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To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country - where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color's ideas and identities - makes a huge difference.

Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
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Detroit
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Peoples
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Black
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More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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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.
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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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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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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I went to a segregated school I was born a Negro, not a black man.
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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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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I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
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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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 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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My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.
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 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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.
Michael Eric Dyson
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But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated.
Michael Eric Dyson
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If white and black and red and brown can come together to focus our energies on overcoming the racial malaise that persists, then this will have been a great moment.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
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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My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.
Michael Eric Dyson