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Michael Eric Dyson’s ‘Sermon To White America’

With guest host Jane Clayson.

Michael Eric Dyson’s fiery challenge to white America: stop ignoring the injustices facing black America. He’s with us.

A tense weekend after civil rights leader and Rep. John Lewis called the president-elect an illegitimate president. To some it’s symbolic of a greater racial tension in the U.S. Sociologist, activist and minister Michael Eric Dyson has a fiery call to action for white America. To stop violence against black Americans. To acknowledge Black pain. This hour On Point: race relations in America with Michael Eric Dyson.

Guest

Michael Eric Dyson, sociology professor at Georgetown University. Author of the new book, “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon To White America.” Contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and contributing editor at the New Republic and ESPN’s the Undefeated. (@MichaelEDyson)

From The Reading List

New York Times: A Cry From the Heart: Michael Eric Dyson Addresses Race Head-On — “his is a book that will anger some readers, especially those who reject Dyson’s central premise: that if we want true racial equality in America, whites themselves must destroy the enduring myths of white supremacy. Even sympathetic readers might mistake this extraordinary work for merely a catalog of white sins.”

Washington Post: A sermon on the unbearable whiteness of America — “Dyson recounts what he calls the stages of white grief, pulled out whenever white Americans fear their dominance is threatened. They plead ignorance of black life and suffering; appropriate black culture; or simply deny, rewrite or dilute America’s racial history. So please don’t show up with tales about the economic insecurity of the white working class; for Dyson, the 2016 election was entirely about the revenge of whiteness, ‘how it is at once capable of exulting in privilege while proclaiming it is the least privileged of identities . . . and how it howls in primal pain at being forgotten while it rushes to spitefully forget and erase all suffering that isn’t its own'”

Vox: If you want the truth about racism, listen to the Sessions hearing, not just Obama’s farewell— “It’s jarring to think that Obama’s farewell will likely be followed by the appointment to attorney general of a man who was behind the times with respect to race decades before a black president even seemed like a remote possibility.”

Read An Excerpt Of “Tears We Cannot Stop” By Michael Eric Dyson

Array

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Crime scene tape outlines the perimeter of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Miss., on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, after the church was burned and spray-painted with "Vote Trump," three weeks ago. The First Baptist Church of Greenville has offered congregants of the burned church a new place to worship.  (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
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Crime scene tape outlines the perimeter of the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Miss., on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, after the church was burned and spray-painted with "Vote Trump," three weeks ago. The First Baptist Church of Greenville has offered congregants of the burned church a new place to worship. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
A protestor shouts slogans as they march from Manhattan to Brooklyn in New York, Friday, July 8, 2016. Demonstrators took to the New York City streets chanted "hands up, don't shoot" and "no justice no peace." to protest the recent police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, just one day after five police officers were killed and seven others wounded during a protest in Dallas.  (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
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A protestor shouts slogans as they march from Manhattan to Brooklyn in New York, Friday, July 8, 2016. Demonstrators took to the New York City streets chanted "hands up, don't shoot" and "no justice no peace." to protest the recent police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota, just one day after five police officers were killed and seven others wounded during a protest in Dallas. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)