Michael Eric Dyson.

• Author: Love, David A.
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and a political analyst for MSNBC. A prolific writer, he is the author of sixteen books, including Holler If You Hear Me, Is Bill Cosby Right? and I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. He was the host of The Michael Eric Dyson Show, which was broadcast from WEAA, the radio station of Morgan State University in Baltimore from 2009 to 2011.

A Detroit native and a Princeton-educated scholar and theologian, Dyson is among America's most influential thinkers. Known for the forcefulness and agility with which he analyzes social phenomena, race, politics, and culture, Dyson is a black public intellectual whose scholarship is sophisticated yet grounded and accessible. He is a community scholar whose work seamlessly traverses the contours of the civil rights movement and the hip-hop and millennial generations.

With an active on-air presence at MSNBC, Dyson is part of an effort that is changing the look and feel of cable news. The network leads the cable news market among African American viewership, and showcases diverse anchors and contributors including Dyson. He pronounces scathing, even devastating critiques that arouse smiles in his viewing audience.

I caught up with Dyson by phone at the end of August, right after he had participated in a panel discussion of scholars at Georgetown that reflected on the events surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Q: What are your thoughts on the tragic events in Ferguson?

Michael Eric Dyson: An epic tide of grief washed over black America, and indeed engulfed the rest of the nation in flames of agony, protest, resistance, and rage. And the profound character of that grief resides in the fact that this is a problem that has been fairly persistent in many urban black centers across this nation for decades. And if the truth is told, Ferguson exploded long before it finally erupted in flames of anguish after the killing of Michael Brown because of the desperate poverty that's there: The children of 68 percent of the members of that community qualify for free lunches. Twenty-two percent of the people live below poverty. It's a 67 percent black city, presided over by a white mayor and a white prosecutor, with a white governor.

And so there's a sense of being under occupation in that desolate black colony by a regime of elite whites who clearly have little empathy for, or understanding of, the population whose destiny they hold in their hands. Ferguson was the revelation, like Katrina a decade before, of the persistent problems of poverty concentrated in a black urban arena, with the most dangerous and destructive consequences.

And then when you add to that the fact of police brutality, police aggression, police violence, police surveillance, police scrutiny, police intimidation, and police terror, you've got the makings of an unavoidable urban drama whose chaos is measured not simply in the outrage of the people at their treatment but in...