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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

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
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Transcends
Even
Elvis
Think
Parallels
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Jackson
Evident
Michael
Incredible
Artists
Presley

More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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We must continue to insist to our better off brothers and sisters that they are in the same racial boat as their less better off kin. Even elevated class status and superior financial standing cannot ward off the effects and consequences of racism.
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What are you for? It may be, to a degree, consoling that white brothers and sisters did not vote for [Donald] Trump, and do not participate in that brand of animus, that gas-bagging of enormous bigotry.
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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.
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Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.
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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.
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..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.
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I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.
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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.
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I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.
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Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
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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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It's not enough to be against something.
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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.
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Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity that is indeed the negative way of characterizing African American identity.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
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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