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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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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Age
Church
Kids
Recite
Many
Began
Like
Pieces
Grew
Four
Five

More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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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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Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
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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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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.
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Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.
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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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
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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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Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.
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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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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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 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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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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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 suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.
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
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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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..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
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I don't mind the job of saying to white people, Yes, this is what I think you need to know, this is what I think you've been missing. And it's my job to educate white folks every day.
Michael Eric Dyson