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We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 65
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Explain
Understand
Blackness
More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson
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
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
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
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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
It's not enough to be against something.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Michael Eric Dyson
Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
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
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
The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.
Michael Eric Dyson
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
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
I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
Michael Eric Dyson