Quote of the Day

In a sense, Hillary Clinton emerged at what seemed like a strikingly unpropitious moment.  Her strengths -- the boring, the tedious, the serious attention to the small gestures that make big impacts -- seemed ill-suited to the unruly temper of the times.  But this perceived liability might have been her strongest recommendation to the black masses: She may have offered strict attention to policy that unapologetically played to black needs without ever feeling pressure -- as Obama did -- to disown, to begrudge the style of, explicit black advance.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 213

Quote of the Day

Obama argued that what was good for America was good for black folk, when exactly the opposite is true: helping black folk helps America.  Tamping down the war on drugs, which targeted black and brown folk, also spared millions of white youth hooked on methamphetamines and has created enormous empathy for white folk who confront opioid addition.  Strengthening the social safety net for our most vulnerable black and brown citizens also helped struggling white families hit hard by the recession.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 212

Quote of the Day

The palpable discomfort that demonstrations produce forces our political figures to grapple with new ideas.  This is a productive tension.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 207

Quote of the Day

Nothing in this country that has progressed has happened without the politics of disruption.  You can go to the Boston Tea Party: that's the politics of disruption.  The ending of slavery was through the politics of disruption.  Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin -- that disrupted the psyche of a country that called itself a democracy. 

-- Frederick Haynes

Quote of the Day

It is critical to listen, even if one greatly disagrees, not only to plot further strategy and determine if what one argues is effective, but, equally important, to embody the values one seeks to impart.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 205

Quote of the Day

Black witness is always perceived as unjustified rage.  Blackness has no victims in white eyes and therefore has no right to bear witness to whiteness at all.  Bearing witness to racial injustice is always perceived as a direct threat to white supremacy and is therefore an act of hostility that must be neutralized.  One of Black Lives Matter's greatest contributions is to bear witness to the trauma black folk endure but that is often rendered invisible. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 201

Quote of the Day

The Black Lives Matter activists insist on the unity of politics and morality: The racist act is connected to the racist intent; the murdering hand is connected to the murderous heart.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 199

Quote of the Day

Witness often exposes the unspoken claims of whiteness -- its privilege to hide, its ability to deflect black suffering into comparatively sterile discussions of policy that take the heat off of "me" and put it on "that."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 196

Quote of the Day

It should be remembered that the civil rights movement shocked the American system.  Martin Luther King may have a statue in his memory on the National Mall, but the FBI considered him "the most dangerous Negro" in America.  His fellow activists were hosed, beaten, bitten by dogs, even murdered -- sometimes with the help of law enforcement, more often as they looked the other way in cruel indifference.  Black witness was an affront to American denial, the black bid for equality salt in the ongoing wound of Confederate loss. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 195-196

Quote of the Day

The moral dimensions of race exert a profound influence on how we distribute social goods, apply public policy and laws, and determine the worth and value of human life.  It is already against the law for the police to unjustly murder black folk.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 188-189

Quote of the Day

For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean -- or as clean as one can make it.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 164

Quote of the Day

The role of the intellectual is to deepen inquiry and broaden understanding.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 163

Quote of the Day

It's been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we're protesting America.

-- Beyonce

Quote of the Day

The reason we're in the fraught political and social time that we're in right now is because the old guard is dying.  And the old guard is not in a position to regain power.  It's trying.  I'm a full believer that what we're experiencing now are the last gasps.  

-- Keegan-Michael Key

Quote of the Day

If you have no interest in equal rights for black people, then do not make suggestions for those who do.  Sit down.

-- Jesse Williams

Quote of the Day

I don't want to hear any more about how far we've come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old [Tamir Rice] playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich.

-- Jesse Williams

Quote of the Day

Police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm, and not kill white people every day.

-- Jesse Williams

Quote of the Day

It is the writer's necessity to deal as truthfully as possible with his own experience, and it is his hope to enlarge his experience to contain the experience of others, of millions.

-- James Baldwin

Quote of the Day

Artists have a dual function: first, they know the truth of the human condition.  Second, artists prove, and help humanity to grapple with, the notion that [as James Baldwin argued] "safety is an illusion," thus "all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 90-91

Quote of the Day

(James Baldwin) argued that the artist must embrace the very thing most folk avoid: the aloneness of the human condition.  Part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the aloneness of "birth, suffering, love, and death"; the artist must encourage folk to engage what they would rather avoid...

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 90

Quote of the Day

If American politics is to regain its juice, recapture its vigor, it must be pushed and shaped by vibrant figures who hold it accountable.  When [James] Baldwin and his friends confronted Bobby Kennedy, Kennedy got mad, but then anger gave way to honest reflection and sincere self-criticism.  Bobby had to reckon with the invisibility of black humanity, even to his own liberal eyes, especially his own privileged eyes.  But in that abrasive exchange with Baldwin and his friends, enough humanity seeped through to let him at least hear the echoes of their trauma.  And in that moment there was emotional movement on his part, if not full-blown transformation.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 86

Quote of the Day

I don't think we can afford to be in a silo and make progress . . . There would be no gay liberation movement if there wasn't a civil rights movement.  And the women's rights movement too.  So they all build on each other because they're all interrelated. I think the biggest enemy, and the biggest oppression, in my mind, in all of this, is white supremacy, patriarchy, which is closely related to sexism and religious subjugation, and if you get at all of that, all these other issues get resolved.

-- Andrea Jenkins

Quote of the Day

This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us; they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.  For them, dignity isn't something you're born with but something you measure, by...the gender of your spouse, the country of your birth, the color of your skin, the God of your prayers.

-- Joseph Kennedy

Quote of the Day

Only when we have a full-throated voicing of our vibrant democracy in all of its splendidly cantankerous diversity can we truly claim at last to be American.

-- Joseph Kennedy

Quote of the Day

You can't talk about the history of race in America without talking about slavery.  It's the sin, the blemish, a shameful part of our history.  To talk about race in America requires one to face truth in terms of the disparities that exist based on race.  And the truth makes people very uncomfortable.  There's a natural desire to have conversations where everyone walks away feeling lovely, and it's been pleasant.  But not so much when you're talking about race.

-- Kamala Harris

Quote of the Day

The truth is that American politics has hardly neglected the interests of the white working and middle classes.  The progress experienced under the banner of the movement for racial, gender, and sexual justice has forced white folks to share just a little of their bounty with blacks, Latinos, women, and queer folk.  To be sure, these groups are hardly homogenous or univocal.  Yet concern for their own interests leads whites to think of their well being at the expense of other groups, compromising the nation's democratic health.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 68

Quote of the Day

Many whites now see the truth because they believe that what Trump is doing is deeply and profoundly flawed, even lunatic.  His obsessions and perverse preoccupations are the stuff of a whiteness that never had to be held accountable.  Trump's total lack of knowledge, and the enshrinement of ignorance as the basis of power and authority, is the personification of white supremacy and white arrogance.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 63-64

Quote of the Day

Recently, as bigotry resurfaces, symbolized in the events in Charlottesville in August 2017, the lie is put to the belief that "this is not American, this is not us," when, indeed, it truly is.  We do not want to acknowledge how true it is because it makes us look complicit in prejudice we thought we had gotten over.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 62

Quote of the Day

For those who take solace in the belief that Trump is a marginal player in whiteness, they are sadly mistaken.  He is, indeed, the extension of the logic of American ideas about blackness found at the nation's roots and beginnings.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 61

Quote of the Day

The white refusal to concede Obama's legitimacy was the articulation of the deeply rooted refusal to see blackness as American.  Donald Trump's birtherism was the extended unfolding of such an idea.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 61

Quote of the Day

When Robert Kennedy met with James Baldwin and his friends [in 1963], he weathered a heady downpour of racial and political truths that we still confront today: that politics, and the state, exist to defend white interests and identities; that witness is an important means to express black grievance and resistance and to shape public policy; that dormant and resurgent white bigotry, even at the highest level of government, must be identified and opposed; and that a new politics must be formed to fulfill true democracy.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 53