Top 80 Michael Eric Dyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party’s nominee. I’m saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

52. “Race makes class hurt more.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

53. “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

54. “President Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

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

— Michael Eric Dyson

56. “There are many Americans who regardless of the intelligence or the profound political persuasion of a figure will never vote for a black man. Not all of them are racists; some are skeptical, and some are suspicious.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

57. “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.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

58. “Most black folk get the moral intent of black prophecy and believe that they and their divine mouthpieces have a God-given right to express their gripes in the privacy of sacred space. They do not mistake anger at America’s imperial excesses for hatred of the nation or a denial of the wonderful changes that can unfold in the country when courage weds imagination.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

59. “I’m nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

60. “Their sermons help black folk resist the evil seductions of white supremacy. Very few members go away from such homilies without hope for their future or belief in their individual importance. Very few leave without a sense of God’s care for their burdens and traumas.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

61. “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

62. “To this day my grandson is worried every time he sees a cop. He fears the cops will try to arrest him and his father. He can’t understand why the color of his skin is a reason to be targeted by the police. Mosi is only seven years old.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

63. “Trump is missing the point when he says that Kaepernick should “find a country that works better for him.” Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation – and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

64. “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

65. “Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn’t new.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

66. “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

67. “Obama had always to field demands from some blacks to be blacker, and the wish of many whites to whitewash the story of American race and politics.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

68. “President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

69. “The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

70. “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.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

71. “But I remain what I was when I started my vocation, my pilgrimage of self-discovery: a black preacher. It is for that reason that I don’t want to – really, I can’t afford to – give up on the possibility that white America can definitively, finally, hear from one black American preacher a plea, a cry, a sermon, from my heart to yours.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

72. “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

73. “To not try, to give up on the possibility that we can make a difference, can make the difference, is to give up on our past, on our complicated, difficult, but victorious past. Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

74. “I know that when we get out of our own way and let the spirit of love and hope shine through we are a better people.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

75. “All Americans deserve an equal crack at what it means to be a – having – having resources in your own home and in your state and in your country.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

76. “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.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

77. “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.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

78. “White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt. White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situtation.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

79. “The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

80. “If our neighbors were white, they’d be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It’s not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

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

— Michael Eric Dyson

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

— Michael Eric Dyson

83. “Maleness has functioned in our race much like whiteness has in the larger culture: its privileges have been rendered normal, its perspectives natural, its biases neutral, its ideas superior, its anger wholly justifiable, and its way of being the gift of God to the universe.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

84. “The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

85. “And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

86. “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.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

87. “What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings. Many.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

88. “Loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths,” he said. “It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.” A.”

— Michael Eric Dyson

89. “And at the end of the day, I think that those of us who are free citizens of this country, and of America, should figure out ways to respect the humanity of the other, to respect the individual existence of the other, and also respect the fact that barriers have been placed upon particular groups that have prevented them from flourishing. That’s all I mean by political correctness.”

— Michael Eric Dyson