Michael Eric Dyson Quotes

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

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

I don't think that an emphasis on the peculiar plight of black males at all suggests that others are not suffering, or that such attention suggests that black men and women feel sorry for themselves.

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

I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the less fortunate of our number.

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

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

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

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

Even when you don't know, you're supposed to know.

We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.

It's not enough to be against something.

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

..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.