Michael Eric Dyson

There are things that you can do on an individual level, even as you continue to fight oppression systemically, that make things…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity…

— Michael Eric Dyson

My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.

— Michael Eric Dyson

He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was…

— Michael Eric Dyson

“That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology. Each”

— Michael Eric Dyson

“Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

“a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn’t convince you of the…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

— Michael Eric Dyson

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be…

— Michael Eric Dyson

“What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Originality doesn't consist of saying it first, originality consists of saying it in a way that is specifically tailored to the moment…

— Michael Eric Dyson

There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I…

— 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

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like…

— Michael Eric Dyson

If you take a guy like a Barack Obama, who's raised millions of dollars from the most donors in the history of…

— Michael Eric Dyson

“I am subject to constant criticism all day long,” the president told me in our Oval Office discussion. “And some of it…

— Michael Eric Dyson

“Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You…

— Michael Eric Dyson

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly…

— 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

“Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and…

— Michael Eric Dyson

What I'm talking about is both political and then also extra-political. Because what Donald Trump is doing is not simply to be…

— Michael Eric Dyson

The emphasis on personal responsibility is something we've had in black America from the get-go. Every major leader and intellectual worth her…

— Michael Eric Dyson

“So what are you supposed to do? My friends, what I need you to do—just for starters—is not act. Not yet. Not…

— Michael Eric Dyson

We began to connect literacy and learning and the lively effects of biblical knowledge and preaching pretty early. That was a tremendous…

— Michael Eric Dyson

I have to constantly negotiate the tension between past neighborhood and present neighborhood.

— Michael Eric Dyson

We are not all the same; we don't think alike; and we have the right to openly express those differences in ways…

— 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…

— Michael Eric Dyson

If journalism is the first draft of history, then digital literacy is the first blush of the first page of history.

— Michael Eric Dyson

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

— Michael Eric Dyson

I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its…

— Michael Eric Dyson

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.

— Michael Eric Dyson

Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite…

— Michael Eric Dyson

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

— Michael Eric Dyson

I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Black women must challenge black men to live up to their best in every arena of the culture - at job, at…

— Michael Eric Dyson

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.

— Michael Eric Dyson

You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and…

— Michael Eric Dyson

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

— Michael Eric Dyson

I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.

— Michael Eric Dyson