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Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.

Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Eric Dyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 23
Author
Biographer
Historian
Detroit
Michigan
Surely
Especially
Race
American
Comes
Bigotry
Commodity

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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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The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Michael Eric Dyson
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[ Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher] introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites.
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 knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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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 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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You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and unsubtantiated, beliefs.
Michael Eric Dyson
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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
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Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
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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I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone.
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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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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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