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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

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
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I was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.
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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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The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
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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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Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.
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I went to a segregated school I was born a Negro, not a black man.
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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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Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers.
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The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Michael Eric Dyson
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The demonizing of black identity is much more of a global phenomenon than many would like to admit. I've traveled abroad extensively, and it's hard to ignore the subordination of darker peoples to lighter peoples the world around.
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I think sometimes younger people - not necessarily thinkers and intellectuals and the like, but people who are on social media and who are not as informed as journalists or professional thinkers - may get a bit, you know, impatient with the necessity of sustained thinking, sustained argumentation, sustained dialogue.
Michael Eric Dyson
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I think that he [Michael Jackson] did derive an ultimate sense of joy and satisfaction in what others enjoyed from him that was denied to himself. There's no question that the transcendent art that he created was a means, an instrument, a vehicle for others to experience what he didn't.
Michael Eric Dyson