Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson

About Michael Eric Dyson:

Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, and radio host. He is a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited 18 books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Marvin Gaye; Nas's debut album Illmatic; Bill Cosby; Tupac Shakur; and Hurricane Katrina.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Michael Eric Dyson

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...

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 race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this...

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

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.

Michael Eric Dyson

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that i...

Michael Eric Dyson

I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.

Michael Eric Dyson

Race was thick in the O.J. Simpson case from the very beginning, but it wasn't evident. And I think the O.J. Simpson case revealed that there is subtle race, and there is sophisticated race, and there's evident and observable race.

Michael Eric Dyson

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

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

Michael Eric Dyson

In the minds of many Americans, if you are a radical Democrat or a Socialist, you are automatically a Communist. And if you are a Communist, then therefore you are an anti-American person and a person who is not a patriot. But nothing is further from...

Michael Eric Dyson

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

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 liter...

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 and bloody fields of political mission.

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 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 mobi...

Michael Eric Dyson

The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, ...

Michael Eric Dyson

When you have closed the Bible, you have neither closed God's mind nor shut God's mouth. God continues to speak, live and exist. I think we should consult the living God for the living word for living people dealing with death, destruction and despai...

Michael Eric Dyson

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 a...

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 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 greatl...

Michael Eric Dyson

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

Author Bio

  • NameMichael Eric Dyson
  • DescriptionAuthor, professor
  • BornOctober 23, 1958
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian