Michael Dyson Quotes

I think, the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of "We want society to see what's happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways." And those impulses I very much understand.

If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.

I think black Americans expect too much from individual black Americans in terms of changing the status quo.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

A race-transcendent politics is most likely to succeed when the white community takes responsibility for overcoming its racism, not when the black community decides to forget it.

The world has made being black a crime .... I hope to make it a virtue.

It is just not something we need to forget easily, to just bend the knee, to put on our t-shirts, Black Lives Matter, and one week after everyone forgets that.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

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

I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'

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

While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

I thought our community should have a deep dialogue to make black America better. I believe if we make black America better, we make all of America better.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

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.

So black people all across this country are uniting. They must unite, and they must organize themselves.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.

I'll also say, yes, I think the change in black consciuosness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life.

We need Black supremacy to get Negroes off their knees in churches that preach a white heaven, a white God and a white universe.

My number one priority is to save the Black man.

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.