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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.

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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Reclaim
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More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
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Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
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Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
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I went to school four years later than most people because I was a teen father, hustled on the streets, worked, lived on welfare and the like, and didn't get to college until almost 21. That's when I officially got licensed and ordained, right after that.
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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.
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It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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.
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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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.
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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.
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Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.
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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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.
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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The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
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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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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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.
Michael Eric Dyson
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I think the reality is Michael Jackson's humanity is so deep, the implications and inferences of his art so monumentally and magnificently global, that nothing American television could do to besmirch his character could ever, if you will, deny the legitimate genius that he represents and America has responded, as indeed has the globe.
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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.
Michael Eric Dyson