#tears we cannot stop

[universitybookstore]

“The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.”  -- Michael Eric Dyson, from his new book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, out now from St. Martin’s Press.

[soulbrotherv2]

#1 Best Seller in Sociology of Race Relations

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (January 17, 2017)

by Michael Eric Dyson

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice is heard above the rest. In his New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Isabel Wilkerson called it "an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain" and "crushingly powerful," and Beyoncé tweeted about it. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted. Short, emotional, literary, powerful―this is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

[BOOK LINK]

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[coverspy]

Tears We Cannot Stop, Michael Eric Dyson (F, 20s, red lipstick, lots of jewelry, rhino print tote bag, C train)

[lesserjoke]

Media log update, book 96. Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

As a racially-conscious progressive, I was hoping Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America would be a powerful tract that I could quote from and recommend to others in the hope of opening their eyes to the state of ongoing racial inequality. And there are individual moments throughout the book that succeed on that front, distilling the message of institutional racism into pithy and easy-to-follow passages. The strongest sections are probably the parts where author Michael Eric Dyson speaks about his own encounters with police and other authority figures, emphasizing the ways that his blackness affected those incidents and the issues that white people don't have to take into consideration in similar circumstances.

Unfortunately, the book as a whole is a rather poor messenger for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. There are logical flaws in many of Dyson's arguments, and I was particularly uncomfortable with his treatment of Jewish Americans as simply a subgroup of white people. (There's no denying that many Jews have some access to white privilege, but it's maddening to suggest that Jewishness is simply a variety of whiteness or that Jews don't face ongoing oppression and discrimination ourselves.) Taken in isolation individual moments might be convincing, but as a whole, I just don't think this Sermon is going to convert anyone to Dyson's point of view.

[riotsandredheads]

Excerpt from Tears we Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson

“Beloved, let me start by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white people. And yet so many of them, so many of you, exist. Please hear me out. I know you’re flesh and blood. I know that you use language and forks and knives. I’m not talking about your bodies or your garages or your grocery stores. I’m talking about the politics of whiteness. I’m talking about an identity that exists apart from the skin you’re born in. I’m talking about a meaning of race that supersedes the features you inherit when you come out of the womb. You don’t get whiteness from your genes. It is a social inheritance that is passed on to you as a member of a particular group. And it’s killing us, and, quiet as it’s kept, it’s killing you too. Race has no meaning outside of the cultures we live in and the worlds we fashion out of its force and energy. Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it. So I want to tell you right off the bat that whiteness is made up, and that white history disguised as American history is a fantasy, as much a fantasy as white superiority and white purity. Those are all myths. They’re intellectual rubbish, cultural garbage. The quicker you accept that, the better off you’ll be, and so will the rest of us. … “

[housingworksbookstore]

#TNREditorTalks: Michael Eric Dyson in conversation & book signing Monday, April at 7pm / FREE

Join @thenewrepublic editor Eric Bates and Michael Eric Dyson, author, Georgetown professor and New Republic contributing editor, in conversation about Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America—Dyson's urgent, heartfelt, and eloquent new book on race relations in the United States. Complementary beverages will be available generously sponsored by the New Republic, as well as free tote bags.

RSVP via Eventbrite (recommended by not required).

[alexiogessa]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngRDIrqUCiw)

I’ve seen Michael Eric Dyson on Real Time with Bill Maher before and he’s a sharp, intelligent thinker.  I gotta get his book!  I think this interview was on point.  I hope he continues the good work.