Michael Eric Dyson famous quotes

Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Kindness #Order #Justice

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Children #Writing #Elderly

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Light #Race #Voice

Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Grief #Agony #People

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Rap #Hip Hop #May

I believe in a God of a second chance and a God of love and mercy, because I need so much more of it myself.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Believe #Second Chance #Needs

The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Reality #Moral

To whom much has been given, much is required.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Given

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Kings #Thinking #Odds

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Humble #Four #Fingers

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Rap #Ghetto #Gangsta

What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Blood #Race #People

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Feet #People #Bully

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Real #People #African American

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Hip Hop #Pavement #Hips

If white and black and red and brown can come together to focus our energies on overcoming the racial malaise that persists, then this will have been a great moment.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#White #Focus #Black

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Real #Responsibility #Thinking

The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Thinking #Artist #Incredibles

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Uplifting #Moving #Tears

Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Expression #Democracy #Pits

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Justice #Sound #Speak

I think the reality is Michael Jackson's humanity is so deep, the implications and inferences of his art so monumentally and magnificently global, that nothing American television could do to besmirch his character could ever, if you will, deny the legitimate genius that he represents and America has responded, as indeed has the globe.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Art #Character #Reality

The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Privilege #Language #Intimacy

Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Years #America #Hip Hop

Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#African American #Debate #Term

What he [Michael Jackson] did was he allowed us, through his voice and his instrument, to see a glimpse of the heaven that he himself was denied. That sacrifice was the ultimate source of redemption that he gave to us.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Sacrifice #Voice #Heaven

I think that he [Michael Jackson] did derive an ultimate sense of joy and satisfaction in what others enjoyed from him that was denied to himself. There's no question that the transcendent art that he created was a means, an instrument, a vehicle for others to experience what he didn't.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Art #Mean #Thinking

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Race #Creative #Genius

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Christian #Views #Vocabulary

I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of black identity and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s, will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Thinking #Black #Identity

I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Thinking #Skills #African American

I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Kings #Thinking #Honor

If you take a guy like a Barack Obama, who's raised millions of dollars from the most donors in the history of this nation, it suggests that there's a deep and profound hunger for a new politics to come forth. And a guy like him has been able to mobilize that and to reach certain parts of the hip-hop generation.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Profound #Hip Hop #Guy

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Mean #Reality #Race

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Dog #People #Community

I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Brother #Father #Believe

My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Ambition #Community #Grows

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

#Interesting #Church #Want

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

#White #America #Black

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

#Impact #Political #Hip Hop

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

#People #Church #Want

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 Eric Dyson

#Clothes #Entrepreneur #Hip Hop

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.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Believe #Self #People

I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind of jobs to support my young son. There's what frames my view on the topics I discuss on my shows, and the average person relates to that. No matter how many degrees I have now, I lived that life, and that comes through to the people watching.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Jobs #Father #Son

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Humorous #The End Of The Day #Way

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#America #People #Deserve Better

Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Intelligent #Offering #Seductive

We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Moral #Calculus #Willing

I don't worship the Bible, I worship the God who gave the Bible.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Worship

I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Thinking #Giving #Trying

Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.'
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Said #Criticize

There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Dark #Clothes #People

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Rap #Guy #Looks

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Dream #Kings #Simple

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Kings #Night #Years

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

#People #Black #Detroit

..And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Rapper #Racism #Hip Hop

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#School #Men #Black

Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Brother #White #America

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Party #Home #New Orleans

Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Men #Empathy #Stripes

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Play #Labels #Records

There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Book #Rights #White

There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Athlete #Golf #Men

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#White #Machines #Demand

There is no conscious choice of heterosexual identity any more than there is a homosexual one. The last person in the world who wants to be homosexual, for the most part, are homosexuals.
-- Michael Eric Dyson

#Choices #Identity #World