Quote

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

Michael Eric Dyson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Justice
Sound
Speak
Love
Like
Speaks
Sounds
Public

More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of e pluribus unum.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
What he [Michael Jackson] did was he allowed us, through his voice and his instrument, to see a glimpse of the heaven that he himself was denied. That sacrifice was the ultimate source of redemption that he gave to us.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
We are not all the same we don't think alike and we have the right to openly express those differences in ways that, hopefully, will contribute to our community's welfare.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
It's not enough to be against something.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
Image
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.
Michael Eric Dyson