Quotes from Michael Eric Dyson

Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one's country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely.

What gives me so much pause, and makes me feel so badly, [is] that the country is willing to be that intolerant and not understand the empathy that's necessary to understand other groups' situations.

If we cite the Bible, and yet fail to live according to its codes, the Bible becomes just another book. But when we live it, it becomes powerful. If you believe it, the words of scripture say that we become living epistles in whose life others read the presence of God.

Hustling, the action, the performance, is embraced because it often provides the only relief from economic misery. The hustler is determined not to suffer silently and turns distress to opportunity.

Oh God, we are near complete despair. How can we possibly change our fate? How can we possibly persuade our society that we deserve to be treated with decency and respect? How can we possibly fight a criminal justice system that has been designed to ensure our defeat? How can we possibly combat the blindness of white men and women who are so deeply invested in their own privilege that they cannot afford to see how much we suffer?

This gulf between hope and the heartbreak that is the lot of millions of black poor is nowhere better glimpsed than in the social and economic circumstances that batter the black family

The state ofmthe black family life in America evokes grave concern and graver criticism. . . .From the suffering of children in families that struggle to gain sufficient economic support, to the difficult plight of single black women, to the unemployment and overincarceration of black males, the black family is buffeted by a host of brutal social facts that compromise its quality of survival and make a mockery of King's vision of a black Promised Land

Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn't even exist without us. That's why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president's supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump's victory was hardly surprising.

In the fight for civil rights] The threat and reality of death played many roles simultaneously: It is a bitter arena to be played. It was also the producer, director, and often the co-star of many civil rights performances--marches, demonstrations, funerals, rallies, protests, freedom rides, sit-ins, speeches, and eulogies.

Terror and shame go hand in hand. There is fear in realizing that we are helpless to persuade others that we are human. In that moment

Those closer to home have been lashed in the face by a nation that praises white hustle but despises such agency in their darker kin.

To suggest that the lack of personal initiative is the source, and not the consequence, of poverty, is to confuse cause and effect" (p. 206).

Instead, we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.

The artist in Hansberry saw in the photograph of a black woman being manhandled by white cops all the suffering, all the injustice, all the offense to black life. The brutality was grave enough; the spread of the image transmitted trauma and reinforced the vulnerability of black women and, indeed, the race.

Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped for a color-blind society, but only as oppression and racism were destroyed.

Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.

Slavery casts a long shadow across our lives. The spoils we reaped from forcing people to work without wages and treating them with grievous inhumanity continue to haunt us in a racial gulf that seems impossible to overcome.

Black and white people don't merely have different experiences; we seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another.

Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness.

Black families can only prosper when we fix the problems that most hurt them--huge unemployment; racist and opportunistic ending and mortgage practices; diminished family and child care support for poor mothers; stunted retaining programs for black males who've made obsolete by technological advance (while penalizing employers who practice discrimination in hiring bl back males); and the political erosion of early childhood learning programs that are critical to success later in life.

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.

The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.