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Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
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More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson
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
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
..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.
Michael Eric Dyson
It's not enough to be against something.
Michael Eric Dyson
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country - where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color's ideas and identities - makes a huge difference.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
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
We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
Michael Eric Dyson
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
Michael Eric Dyson
The problem is we are left only with empathy - which is critical, if it can be developed - without substantive manifestations of that empathy. It's one thing to attain it intellectually, but it's another thing to do something about it.
Michael Eric Dyson
The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley.
Michael Eric Dyson
I don't think that an emphasis on the peculiar plight of black males at all suggests that others are not suffering, or that such attention suggests that black men and women feel sorry for themselves.
Michael Eric Dyson
Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
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
I went to a segregated school I was born a Negro, not a black man.
Michael Eric Dyson