Michael Eric Dyson Quotes
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My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.
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What are you for? It may be, to a degree, consoling that white brothers and sisters did not vote for Donald Trump, and do not participate in that brand of animus, that gas-bagging of enormous bigotry.
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The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley.
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What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it's been a white identity that's been rendered invisible and neutral because it's seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don't pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go.
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..And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.
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What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.
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Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.
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I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
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Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."
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Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.
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The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.
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I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.
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Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.
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I'm just challenging white supremacy at its intellectual heart every day. It's a pedagogy that I deploy against some of the most vicious resistance to blackness that whiteness is able to throw up. I engage in a lot of intellectual combat with supremacists and with the predicate of white supremacy and white indifference to black identity, and brown and red and yellow identity too, for that matter.
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I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.
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Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.
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No other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members.
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It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others.
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That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily.
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The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.
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Blackness also has positive dimensions, those that bear the political meanings of African American people, among other blacks, who have struggled for self-determination and freedom for centuries. The absence of such an identity doesn't automatically guarantee that we will be free of the images and ideals that fuel stereotypes about black identity. Changing the name will not alter the reality.
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Perception, after all, is not simply a matter of what you believe about yourself, it all encompasses what others think about you, and what has been thought of you historically. I say we can pay attention to those other dimensions of our identity - class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region - while at the same time understanding how our historically produced racial identity continues to serve, or undercut us.
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I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.
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White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.