... many Black folk are exhausted: worn out by the cumulative injuries, quiet indignities, loud assaults, existential threats, microaggressions, macro offenses, and unceasing bombarding of our bodies and psyches in the name of white comfort. Many of us would love nothing more than to take a nap and leave white folk to clean up the mess made by centuries of white comfort. That, too, is a form of dreaming while awake, or daydreaming -- the only kind of dreaming we can afford. This is why Langston Hughes strung together magical words of poetry about dreaming and why Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed out loud for the world to hear in Washington, D.C., in 1963. This is why King was forever tired, his weary southern cadence haunted by the somber melodies of sleeplessness. King's lieutenant Andrew Young said he waged "a war on sleep." King warned the nation of the difficulty of "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," although he was made sleepless by his worry that white folk wouldn't create a just society. King realized that his life was too great a luxury for the guardians of white comfort, mostly because his dream didn't stop in 1963 but rather led him to far more radical visions of economic justice. Like King, most of us must maintain what runaway slave and abolitionist William Parker called "sleepless vigilance."
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 198-199
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