147 Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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

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.

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.

...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.

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

...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.

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.

...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.