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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.

Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Nervous
Refuse
Angel
Conscience
Abide
Light
Refuses
America
Prospects
Best
Lights
Angels

More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.
Michael Eric Dyson
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You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and unsubtantiated, beliefs.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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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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
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There is a consciousness as an agent of one's own destiny as a person in America, there are things that can be done, there are advantages and benefits which exist that are directly related to - and even rest upon - white privilege.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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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
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Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.
Michael Eric Dyson
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I think that what Donald Trump is doing, the way in which racism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim belief and the like are being expressed through the campaign of Donald Trump, calls for, I think, a very vigorous and aggressive response to what he's saying.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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.
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
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I've written a lot of other books and this book [Tears we cannot stop] was different. I couldn't just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.
Michael Eric Dyson