That is my job as an intellectual, as an extension of my vocation: to engage in a serious reckoning with the present manifestation of both white supremacy, white refusal to acknowledge culpability, and the attempts of black people to re-describe the harm and trauma we've endured, as well as to say afresh what it is that must be done if we are to be conscientious.

Michael Eric Dyson

Categorized in : People Jobs White

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

Michael Eric Dyson

criticism writing book

[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.

Michael Eric Dyson

team player thinking

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."

Michael Eric Dyson

blue teacher baby

We should all be about the business of finding, discussing and furthering solutions to our problems. But none of that can be done without at first speaking honestly about the problems we confront, with whoever in our ranks will listen and respond.

Michael Eric Dyson

honestly problem done

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

Michael Eric Dyson

library life-changing discovery

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.

Michael Eric Dyson

church age kids

When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius.

Michael Eric Dyson

impact church years

I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind of jobs to support my young son. There's what frames my view on the topics I discuss on my shows, and the average person relates to that. No matter how many degrees I have now, I lived that life, and that comes through to the people watching.

Michael Eric Dyson

jobs father son

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

Michael Eric Dyson

deserve-better america people

I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone.

Michael Eric Dyson

african-american skills thinking

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

Michael Eric Dyson

race mean reality

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.

Michael Eric Dyson

helping believe people

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

Michael Eric Dyson

impact hip-hop political

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.

Michael Eric Dyson

brother believe father

There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.

Michael Eric Dyson

rights white book

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

Michael Eric Dyson

crime black thinking

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.

Michael Eric Dyson

collective-unconscious rights class

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new.

Michael Eric Dyson

black real people

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

Michael Eric Dyson

criticize said

It is extremely interesting to me that black males, and other black folk, are viewed as self-pitying, by either other blacks who have failed to accurately calculate their own diminished status as a result of racial animosity - both individual and systemic - or by whites who fail to comprehend how, after forcing black folk into subservience for hundreds of years, they now whine about small privileges that pale - so to speak - in comparison to the untold advantage of centuries of benefit.

Michael Eric Dyson

black speak interesting