Michael Dyson Quotes

There is a racist virus in the American blood stream...

So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice.

I have nothing to do with racism in America; it was here when I got here.

I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

The American economy, the American society, the American unconscious are all racist.

You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.

We're not able to hide behind myths of this being a post-racial society because Donald Trump has outlined exactly how a large portion of America feels.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

Conservatives will fight hard to preserve the institutions of mass incarceration and police brutality. Because they don't see themselves as victims of these things, but as benefactors, they will fight hard to preserve the status quo against a reform candidate.

Black lives are too easy to take in America because we don't want to question why people are so afraid of black and brown people to begin with. And that's what I want 'Strong Island' to do.

Imagine if a mob of Black people wanted to go in the White House. Imagine what'd happen. It'd be tear gas. It'd be rubber bullets. It'd be the whole nine yards.

African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.

There's not a racial divide in the city of Ferguson.

You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.