Michael Eric Dyson Quotes

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.

I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.

Light-skinned black people are seen to be closer to white people. The allegiance to lighter-skinned people has operated in a very destructive way that we have internalized ourselves inside black communities. You look at many of the prominent black people in this society who have been able to do well. Many have been lighter-skinned.

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.

I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of Black identity, and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition.

The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.

There are things that you can do on an individual level, even as you continue to fight oppression systemically, that make things a little bit better for an identifiable group.

My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.

[The World Series] introduced me for the first time to a team with a lot of black players. Detroit had about three of them: I think it was Willie Horton, Gates Brown, and Earl Wilson - might have been one or two more in '68.

If you take a guy like a Barack Obama, who's raised millions of dollars from the most donors in the history of this nation, it suggests that there's a deep and profound hunger for a new politics to come forth. And a guy like him has been able to mobilize that and to reach certain parts of the hip-hop generation.

All Americans deserve an equal crack at what it means to be a - having - having resources in your own home and in your state and in your country.

If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except, however, as your experiences are pressured by empirical investigation of complex phenomena. I suspect that even when you control for variables of individual laziness, you'll see that what you see before you masses of black poor people unwilling to work hard to get better will not be as simply concluded as you might at first believe. Continue your good work.

A lot of the commercial expression of hip-hop leaves a lot to be desired - but then, there's a lot of whack gospel music, but I'm not leading a crusade against it. Of course, the vices of hip-hop are far more influential, I understand. But the good that hip-hop transmits, the power of the culture to rally the best of our protest, and uplift, and resistance, traditions, is often unfairly overlooked.

I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.

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.

I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.

Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.

Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.'

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.

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.

What I'm talking about is both political and then also extra-political. Because what Donald Trump is doing is not simply to be measured in terms of its political effect. It's the very spiritual uplift of the nation. It's the very tenor and tone, morally speaking, of what this country is about. And so the unleashing of these fierce and ferocious beliefs have a potential impact that is quite deleterious, quite negative, quite destructive. And I think we have to say something.

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.

All of us should be much more humble and contrite when we point the finger at somebody else, because four more fingers are pointing back at us.

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged.

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.

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in.

Of course, I could never suggest that only poor people are misogynistic; too many rich folk are just as hateful of women as any poor person might be. I don't know if social problems are only circular; perhaps other geometric metaphors might better describe the triangular effects of social vulnerability, political oppression, and racial disadvantage. I think you're right - we've got to focus on both analyses and solutions. And sometimes, an adequate analysis goes far along in suggesting a suitable solution.

I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.

Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

I don't mind the job of saying to white people, "Yes, this is what I think you need to know, this is what I think you've been missing." And it's my job to educate white folks every day.

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.

The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.

I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the less fortunate of our number.

We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.

We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.

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.

The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.

Black women must help black men understand their full potential lies not in denying black women full access to their humanity and opportunity, but in working diligently to overcome the odds that hamper our progress. Yes, some of that is self-imposed, and we must confront it; and much of it comes from outside. But without courageous and brilliant black women, our communities are greatly diminished.

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Furthermore, the financial and social investment in prisons means that black and brown youth become, essentially, fodder for the machinery of capitalized incarceration. The steady supply of guns in the U.S. makes an already untenable situation even more dangerous, and all of us must raise our voices, write to Congress, hit the streets in protest, attend budget meetings of local municipalities - all to state our opposition to such criminal procedures and practices for our youth.

The only way for white folks to reclaim the full arc of their humanity, the full trajectory of their ethical content, of their ethical identity, is to surrender the white innocence that prevents them from being fully mature.

I went to see Chris Rock on Saturday night here in Atlanta, and he made a statement in his comedy. He said, look, when you're the big person, when you're the rich person, poor people can say stuff about you, but it's downright wrong and brutal for rich people to beat up on poor people. He said people who are larger can lampoon people who are skinnier, but not the opposite.

[ 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.