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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

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Childhood
Parents
Challenges
Parent
Sure
Ghetto
Interesting
Provides
Life
Loving
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More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
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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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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.
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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.
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There are many Americans who regardless of the intelligence or the profound political persuasion of a figure will never vote for a black man. Not all of them are racists some are skeptical, and some are suspicious.
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I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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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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
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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've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.
Michael Eric Dyson
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The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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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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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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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
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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
Michael Eric Dyson