Tough love for White America: an interview with Michael Eric Dyson.

AuthorStockwell, Norman
PositionInterview

Michael Eric Dyson is a scholar, activist, and author who has been an ordained Baptist minister since the age of nineteen. He is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and is the author of twenty books on topics ranging from Malcolm X to Marvin Gaye, from race and politics to hip-hop culture. His most recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (St. Martin's Press, January 2017), was written during Donald Trump's presidential campaign and election. We spoke by telephone in late January.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Q: Why did you choose to write this book as a sermon?

Michael Eric Dyson: I felt for this book there was something more transcendent that needed to be attempted. Then I said, look, I've been an ordained Baptist minister for more than thirty-five years. Let me just resort to that preaching voice where a minister stands before the members of a congregation, not above them, but empathetically ensconced in their lives.

That's the voice I wanted to adopt, because I knew I had some difficult things to say for many white brothers and sisters--a loving and affectionate voice, but at the same time a demanding one, a tough love.

Q: You say in the book that "the 2016 election was indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and perhaps the most important. Whiteness was at stake in a way that it hadn't been in decades." Could you explain what the presidency of Barack Obama represented and what Van Jones has called the "whitelash" against him?

Dyson: Barack Obama is an extraordinary figure. He's as affable and genial as one might imagine. But he was willing, in some instances, to draw a false equivalency between experiences. For instance, in his race speech, he drew an equivalence between black anger of the 1960s and white anger in the present. The only problem, of course, is that black anger of the '60s was generated by outrage against oppression. Much of the white anger in our own time is a misplaced aggression toward black people and other vulnerable minorities, believing they have somehow gotten an unfair come-up. So it's a resentment against racial progress. That's a dangerous false equivalence that Obama drew.

Donald Trump, for two years nearly, led the most heinous assault on the legitimacy of Barack Obama--his legitimacy as a human being and as a figure of estimable political worth--and really tried to retroactively abort him from the American democratic womb.

Q: You write in the book about some of the recent...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT