Michael Dyson Quotes

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

I want you to admit that there is such a thing as white privilege.

The separating of a section of America for Afro- Americans is similar to expecting a heaven in the sky somewhere after you die.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.

I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.

The problem is that America is still so racist - I guess it's hard to find another word for it ­ - that they still, the press in general and many people, perceive only white women as feminists. They think black women are black.

I think racial justice - and addressing the sick and enduring legacy of structural racism - remains one of the greatest challenges of our time, and one that's particularly important for more and more white people to speak up about.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

Listen, we've got one little ol' black president, and white folks are upset, but they've had 43.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

The average white person now feels that anti-white bias is a bigger problem than other forms of racial discrimination.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.