147 Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

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.

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

I don’t believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that’s the case, you ain’t self-made.

White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It’s not black or white-on-white crime. It’s proximity murder.

Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror. That terror is fast. It is glimpsed in cops giving chase to black men and shooting them in their backs without cause. Or the terror is slow. It chips like lead paint on a tenement wall, or flows like contaminated water through corroded pipes that poison black bodies. It is slow like genocide inside prison walls where folk who should not be there perish.

The election of President Trump was all about whiteness. How whiteness is ingeniously adaptable to a gross variety of circumstances. How it is at once capable of exulting in.

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

All of us should be much more humble and contrite when we point the finger at somebody else, because four more fingers are pointing back at us.

He was not hip-hop’s most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was more than the sum of his artistic parts.