Quotes from Michael Eric Dyson

The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, "Yes, you're right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.

The status quo always favors neutrality which in truth is never neutral at all but supports those who stand against change.

And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.

President Donald Trump chose "Make America Great Again" as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture.

His dreams were the natural reflex of hope and redeemed curiosity.

Race makes class hurt more.

Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.

And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won't make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.

The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.

Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent.

If our neighbors were white, they'd be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It's not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too.

Trump is missing the point when he says that Kaepernick should "find a country that works better for him." Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation—and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes.

But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement.

What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings. Many

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 come living epistles in whose life others read the presence of God.

Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven't seen since the height of the civil rights movement. Trump