Michael Dyson Quotes

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

I'M HOPELESS, because I've lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I'm not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate.

We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. "I know what is best for you," but they don't know what is best for us! It is time now to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal.

Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everyone else in society.

The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.

We need to have a discussion on race, but we also need to have a discussion on how we are treating poor and minority people in this country.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

When something really affects you, it's hard to find the humor in it sometimes. There's are a lot of reasons why there are so many white male comedians, but I think part of it is that they are able to joke about a lot of things because a lot of things don't affect them personally.

I hope people listen to black people more. You'd be surprised how little people listen to black people when it comes to racial issues. It's weird.

I think that the problem of the American negro goes beyond the principle of any organization whether it's a religious, political, or otherwise.

I just heard that some lead was coming into Newark into schools, and I asked the question, "Whose schools?" They said, "The Black and the Brown." Is that an accident? I don't think so. We are being designed to be destroyed - and unless we see that, and come together as a people under vicious attack we will suffer the consequences of evil that's in high places.

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

The truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface we have huge issues at play that really do affect women. It's time for all the women in America and all the women that love women and all the gay people and the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now.

I think that we need to have an honest conversation in this country. This idea that somehow we're beyond sexism, beyond racism is just wrong. And this is where having an honest conversation with white men about their issues and their concerns, and having honest conversations about the experiences that African-Americans are still having, despite who's the president of the United States, in the criminal justice system that we see in sentencing, we see in policing and a lot of these issues.

When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.

I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, "[Don't] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it. Do you think that the only problem is that I don't care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people, or immigrants, or ...?"

Historically it has been a touchy subject, especially in the south where I am from, people don't really talk about it. If they do talk about it, it is often talked about negatively. Nowadays in light of the Black Lives Matter movement I think people should pay attention to these lives also. I think the Black community will really embrace the film [Moonlight]. It is about us. It is real.