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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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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Trying
Failed
Cultural
Analysis
Criticism
Least
Write
Book
Sociological
Writing
Straightforward

More quotes by 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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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 that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of Black identity, and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition.
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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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.
Michael Eric Dyson
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You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.
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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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
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All Americans deserve an equal crack at what it means to be a - having - having resources in your own home and in your state and in your country.
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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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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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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We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.
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 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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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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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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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.
Michael Eric Dyson