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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

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Peculiar
Feel
Men
Males
Think
Sorry
Thinking
Attention
Suffering
Plight
Black
Suggests
Others
Emphasis
Women

More quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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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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We began to connect literacy and learning and the lively effects of biblical knowledge and preaching pretty early. That was a tremendous impact.
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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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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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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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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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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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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That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily.
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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Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.
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 was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.
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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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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Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Michael Eric Dyson
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Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Michael Eric Dyson
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We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
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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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