Quotes from Michael Eric Dyson

President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

I know that when we get out of our own way and let the spirit of love and hope shine through we are a better people.

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it.

Most black folk get the moral intent of black prophecy and believe that they and their divine mouthpieces have a God-given right to express their gripes in the privacy of sacred space. They do not mistake anger at America's imperial excesses for hatred of the nation or a denial of the wonderful changes that can unfold in the country when courage weds imagination.

The black church is quite literally a sounding board for vetting ideas and voicing frustrations so black folk can stay sane in the midst of America's denial of black humanity.

Their sermons help black folk resist the evil seductions of white supremacy. Very few members go away from such homilies without hope for their future or belief in their individual importance. Very few leave without a sense of God's care for their burdens and traumas.

White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt. White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situtation

What, then, can we do? We must return to the moral and spiritual foundations of our country and grapple with the consequences of our original sin.

Ebony magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans and one of the 150 most powerful blacks in the nation. Dr. Dyson is the author nineteen books, including four New York Times bestsellers.

White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top off.

Wolf acknowledged that "a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of the police will never happen to them.

As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling 'the thugs' in whatever way they see fit.

The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Schools often use Black students in this way in order to achieve racial reckoning on the cheap. They avoid bringing in teachers—or, in other settings, corporations avoid bringing in experts—to address gaps, holes, and areas of ignorance. And the burden for teaching falls on the few Black or Brown folk in the room or office, instead of being assumed by the white folk in those arenas in need of the reflection and change. It is all so utterly exhausting.

we must reckon with the plague of police brutality and how it has ravaged Black communities for three centuries. The cops remain in large part violent enforcers of white supremacy.

The revolutionary cries of Black Lives Matter rest upon a simple yet poignant foundation: that Black lives, which haven't mattered, should matter, and that we must reform the criminal justice system, greatly change if not abolish the police, and grapple with systemic racism.

in a true democracy, things are often messy, ...you often don't get what you want or deserve immediately, and... you have to constantly engage, protest, resist, and negotiate.

one need not be religious at all to believe that we should be willing to give what we seek: charitable interpretations of behavior and a willingness to offer just appraisals of conduct with an eye toward fairness.

We have given this country the spiritual will and the moral maturity it lost in the bitter divorce of principle and practice. Our nation can only reach its best

If justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public, then patience is what mercy sounds like out loud, and forgiveness is the accent with which grace speaks.

As we watched more carefully, we began to notice who was marching. The protesters included some

A disturbing habit has arisen: ordinary white women, neither empowered by the courts nor sanctioned by social services, demand that Black folk give account of their actions, their presence, or their intentions. Such demands (often captured on a video recording) are made to kids selling lemonade on the street, folk barbecuing in the local park, or a student stealing a few moments of shut-eye in an Ivy League university

It is more difficult to reckon with race if we cannot

And at the end of the day, I think that those of us who are free citizens of this country, and of America, should figure out ways to respect the humanity of the other, to respect the individual existence of the other, and also respect the fact that barriers have been placed upon particular groups that have prevented them from flourishing. That's all I mean by political correctness.