147 Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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.

I knew Snoop Dog didn’t start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn’t start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn’t start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.

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.

No other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members.

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines.

Michael Joseph Jackson’s genius was the ability to be the raw article himself – the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.

I think that what Donald Trump is doing, the way in which racism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim belief and the like are being expressed through the campaign of Donald Trump, calls for, I think, a very vigorous and aggressive response to what he’s saying.

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.

Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison’s work, Rampersad’s text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.