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[ Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher] introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.

Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Taught
Grade
Literature
Studied
Read
James
Important
Grades
Hughes
Appetite
Appetites
Early
Introduced
Poetry
Authors
Teacher
Fifth

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Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity that is indeed the negative way of characterizing African American identity.
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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 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.
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I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
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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.
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The only way for white folks to reclaim the full arc of their humanity, the full trajectory of their ethical content, of their ethical identity, is to surrender the white innocence that prevents them from being fully mature.
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We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
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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.
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There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
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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.
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The demonizing of black identity is much more of a global phenomenon than many would like to admit. I've traveled abroad extensively, and it's hard to ignore the subordination of darker peoples to lighter peoples the world around.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Michael Eric Dyson