People Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

— Michael Eric Dyson

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'

— Michael Eric Dyson

I want young people to look at me and go, 'Damn, I want to be like that brother. He sharp, he be…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind…

— Michael Eric Dyson

With the evolution of social media that includes blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, who and how information is delivered has changed tremendously. The…

— Michael Eric Dyson

We need all the newfangled web-based Internet spread, you know, social media that can catalyze, you know, some serious consciousness about what's…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I went to school four years later than most people because I was a teen father, hustled on the streets, worked, lived…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I hope [white brothers and sisters] read this book [Tears we cannot stop] and engage with it, but other white people have…

— Michael Eric Dyson

That is my job as an intellectual, as an extension of my vocation: to engage in a serious reckoning with the present…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a…

— Michael Eric Dyson

But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black…

— Michael Eric Dyson

When people are not sure about their future, when their economies are suffering, when their personal fortunes are flagging, we have often…

— Michael Eric Dyson

If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except,…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Whiteness itself is artifice, is fiction, is a construction, is narrative, is myth. And I seek to deconstruct all of that, to…

— Michael Eric Dyson

There is not a history of black intellectuals being allied with dominant forces to hold white people in social and cultural subordination…

— Michael Eric Dyson

White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Of course, I could never suggest that only poor people are misogynistic; too many rich folk are just as hateful of women…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal…

— Michael Eric Dyson

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I don't mind the job of saying to white people, "Yes, this is what I think you need to know, this is…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Blackness also has positive dimensions, those that bear the political meanings of African American people, among other blacks, who have struggled for…

— Michael Eric Dyson

We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The heartbeat of your originality is deep within a body of thought that continually wrestles with the contradictions and limitations that we're…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his…

— Michael Eric Dyson

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I think sometimes younger people - not necessarily thinkers and intellectuals and the like, but people who are on social media and…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Light-skinned black people are seen to be closer to white people. The allegiance to lighter-skinned people has operated in a very destructive…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they…

— Michael Eric Dyson

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…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The consequences of whiteness are particularly lethal right now. And the ignorance about it, especially on the part of white people themselves,…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I went to see Chris Rock on Saturday night here in Atlanta, and he made a statement in his comedy. He said,…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I'm in bed, so to speak, more with those people who consider themselves atheists but who are concerned about the same things,…

— Michael Eric Dyson