Quotes from Michael Eric Dyson

When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius.

Ain't no gay filter for the cash.

The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.

In black America mother love is second only to the love of God - but just slightly.

The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action.

American history hugs colorblindness. If you can't see race you certainly can't see racial responsibility. You can simply remain blind to your own advantages.

Black bodies have been killed and progress has been stalled to provide white comfort.

That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology. Each

To not try, to give up on the possibility that we can make a difference, can make the difference, is to give up on our past, on our complicated, difficult, but victorious past. Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.

Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding. It

Maleness has functioned in our race much like whiteness has in the larger culture: its privileges have been rendered normal, its perspectives natural, its biases neutral, its ideas superior, its anger wholly justifiable, and its way of being the gift of God to the universe.

If we are committed to discerning, then defeating, the contemporary logic of racism, we must separate it from its ties to democracy itself. In order to be true patriots, we must become disloyal to chronically prejudiced views of American society that persist in our rather ignoble Trumpian moment.

I am subject to constant criticism all day long," the president told me in our Oval Office discussion. "And some of it may be legitimate; much of it may be illegitimate. Some of it may be sincere; some of it may be entirely politically motivated. If I spent all my time thinking about it, I'd be paralyzed. And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, 'I need somebody who's focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.

To this day my grandson is worried every time he sees a cop. He fears the cops will try to arrest him and his father. He can't understand why the color of his skin is a reason to be targeted by the police. Mosi is only seven years old.

Yes it is true . . . America is a racist country.

In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a "nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to do.

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror. That terror is fast. It is glimpsed in cops giving chase to black men and shooting them in their backs without cause. Or the terror is slow. It chips like lead paint on a tenement wall, or flows like contaminated water through corroded pipes that poison black bodies. It is slow like genocide inside prison walls where folk who should not be there perish.

Beloved, there is something black folk fear, whether you can see it or not, whether some of us black folk will say it or not. Our fear is that you believe, that you insist—finally, tragically, without hesitation, with violent repercussions in tow—that, in all sorts of ways, we are still your nigger. It

a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn't convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.

But I remain what I was when I started my vocation, my pilgrimage of self-discovery: a black preacher. It is for that reason that I don't want to—really, I can't afford to—give up on the possibility that white America can definitively, finally, hear from one black American preacher a plea, a cry, a sermon, from my heart to yours.

O! save us, we pray thee, thou God of Heaven and of earth, from the devouring hands of the white Christians!!! . . . The whites have murder'd us, O God! . . . We believe that, for thy glory's sake, Thou wilt deliver us; But that thou may'st effect these things, Thy glory must be sought. —David Walker

Obama had always to field demands from some blacks to be blacker, and the wish of many whites to whitewash the story of American race and politics.