110+ Michael Eric Dyson Quotes On Education, Diversity And Diversity And Inclusion

Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, and radio host. He is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and a New York Times contributing opinion writer. He is best known for his non-fiction books about race, culture, and politics in the United States. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Michael Eric Dyson on education, leadership, diversity.

Top 10 Michael Eric Dyson Quotes

1. He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was more than the sum of his artistic parts.
2. Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.
3. We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
4. I was very struck when Min. Farrakhan said if Jesus and Muhammad were here today, they'd be embracing each other. That's a tremendous message that needs to be heard more broadly.
5. I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
6. I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.
7. I believe in a God of a second chance and a God of love and mercy, because I need so much more of it myself.
8. Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.
9. I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.
10. There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.

Michael Eric Dyson Short Quotes

• Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.
• The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.
• Even when you don't know, you're supposed to know.
• We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
• Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
• I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.
• I don't worship the Bible, I worship the God who gave the Bible.
• Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
• The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
• It's not enough to be against something.

Michael Eric Dyson Quotes About Love

I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents. — Michael Eric Dyson

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. — Michael Eric Dyson

Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.' — Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson Famous Quotes And Sayings

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics. — Michael Eric Dyson

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him. — Michael Eric Dyson

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this. — Michael Eric Dyson

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them. — Michael Eric Dyson

To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country - where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color's ideas and identities - makes a huge difference. — Michael Eric Dyson

My job is to explain stuff you don't know or already know and have to unlearn. My job is to teach you stuff you don't know that you need to know, stuff you should know. I'm going to take what you already know and re-describe it. — Michael Eric Dyson

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence. — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm in bed, so to speak, more with those people who consider themselves atheists but who are concerned about the same things, ideas, and politics I'm concerned with than those who claim to be religious in the same way that I am but have no interest in the political reorganization of society, which needs to be talked about from the pulpit. — Michael Eric Dyson

I was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind. — Michael Eric Dyson

Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us. — Michael Eric Dyson

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think that what Donald Trump is doing, the way in which racism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim belief and the like are being expressed through the campaign of Donald Trump, calls for, I think, a very vigorous and aggressive response to what he's saying. — Michael Eric Dyson

Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes. — Michael Eric Dyson

I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind of jobs to support my young son. There's what frames my view on the topics I discuss on my shows, and the average person relates to that. No matter how many degrees I have now, I lived that life, and that comes through to the people watching. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of Black identity, and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition. — Michael Eric Dyson

But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated. — Michael Eric Dyson

If white and black and red and brown can come together to focus our energies on overcoming the racial malaise that persists, then this will have been a great moment. — Michael Eric Dyson

Light-skinned black people are seen to be closer to white people. The allegiance to lighter-skinned people has operated in a very destructive way that we have internalized ourselves inside black communities. You look at many of the prominent black people in this society who have been able to do well. Many have been lighter-skinned. — Michael Eric Dyson

The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves. — Michael Eric Dyson

We need all the newfangled web-based Internet spread, you know, social media that can catalyze, you know, some serious consciousness about what's going on. But we also need people on the streets pounding the pavement to make a significant and dramatic appearance to suggest that what's going on here is unacceptable. — Michael Eric Dyson

The consequences of whiteness are particularly lethal right now. And the ignorance about it, especially on the part of white people themselves, makes them unavoidably complicit in a system that has to be unmasked, unveiled, undressed in order to be reformed or destroyed. — Michael Eric Dyson

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight. — Michael Eric Dyson

There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House. — Michael Eric Dyson

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in. — Michael Eric Dyson

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. — Michael Eric Dyson

[ Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher] introduced us to these authors early on and taught us that their literature is important. Langston Hughes - we read his poetry. We studied who W.E.B DuBois was. And so she whetted our appetites. — Michael Eric Dyson

There is a consciousness as an agent of one's own destiny as a person in America, there are things that can be done, there are advantages and benefits which exist that are directly related to - and even rest upon - white privilege. — Michael Eric Dyson

I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable. — Michael Eric Dyson

There is no conscious choice of heterosexual identity any more than there is a homosexual one. The last person in the world who wants to be homosexual, for the most part, are homosexuals. — Michael Eric Dyson

America is capable at single moments of receiving the depth and the breadth of the homiletical vision of black America when a black preacher rises to his or her craft at the height of his or her ambition and the desire to tell America the truth. — Michael Eric Dyson

When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius. — Michael Eric Dyson

We should all be about the business of finding, discussing and furthering solutions to our problems. But none of that can be done without at first speaking honestly about the problems we confront, with whoever in our ranks will listen and respond. — Michael Eric Dyson

Originality doesn't consist of saying it first, originality consists of saying it in a way that is specifically tailored to the moment in which you are addressing - and at the moment when the complications arise, challenging the logic of what you're doing. — Michael Eric Dyson

Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to. — Michael Eric Dyson

What are you for? It may be, to a degree, consoling that white brothers and sisters did not vote for [Donald] Trump, and do not participate in that brand of animus, that gas-bagging of enormous bigotry. — Michael Eric Dyson

What he [Michael Jackson] did was he allowed us, through his voice and his instrument, to see a glimpse of the heaven that he himself was denied. That sacrifice was the ultimate source of redemption that he gave to us. — Michael Eric Dyson

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry. — Michael Eric Dyson

Perception, after all, is not simply a matter of what you believe about yourself, it all encompasses what others think about you, and what has been thought of you historically. I say we can pay attention to those other dimensions of our identity - class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region - while at the same time understanding how our historically produced racial identity continues to serve, or undercut us. — Michael Eric Dyson

What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it's been a white identity that's been rendered invisible and neutral because it's seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don't pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society. — Michael Eric Dyson

I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids. — Michael Eric Dyson

I don't mind the job of saying to white people, "Yes, this is what I think you need to know, this is what I think you've been missing." And it's my job to educate white folks every day. — Michael Eric Dyson

Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life. — Michael Eric Dyson

We must continue to insist to our better off brothers and sisters that they are in the same racial boat as their less better off kin. Even elevated class status and superior financial standing cannot ward off the effects and consequences of racism. — Michael Eric Dyson

If journalism is the first draft of history, then digital literacy is the first blush of the first page of history. — Michael Eric Dyson

I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.' — Michael Eric Dyson

Whiteness itself is artifice, is fiction, is a construction, is narrative, is myth. And I seek to deconstruct all of that, to challenge the accretion, the intellectual accretion, the philosophical secretion that generates within the edifice of white supremacy that allows people easy escape, and egress. And I'm saying, "No, you can't leave now. You cannot afford to not know what I'm talking about, because you gotta be held accountable." — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics. — Michael Eric Dyson

That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily. — Michael Eric Dyson

I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures. — Michael Eric Dyson

I hope [white brothers and sisters] read this book [Tears we cannot stop] and engage with it, but other white people have a better chance of speaking more directly to the white folk they know, because they're less likely to be subject to ridicule. They're insiders, so to speak. — Michael Eric Dyson

When people are not sure about their future, when their economies are suffering, when their personal fortunes are flagging, we have often in this country turned to nativism and xenophobia and racism and anti-immigrant sensibilities and passions to express our sense of outrage at what we can't control - and to forge a kind of fitful solidarity that turns out to be rather insular - we look inward and not outward. — Michael Eric Dyson

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind. — Michael Eric Dyson

We began to connect literacy and learning and the lively effects of biblical knowledge and preaching pretty early. That was a tremendous impact. — Michael Eric Dyson

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city. — Michael Eric Dyson

The heartbeat of your originality is deep within a body of thought that continually wrestles with the contradictions and limitations that we're constantly trying to overcome, the curiosities and the ignorances of the people we seek to help. — Michael Eric Dyson

The problem is we are left only with empathy - which is critical, if it can be developed - without substantive manifestations of that empathy. It's one thing to attain it intellectually, but it's another thing to do something about it. — Michael Eric Dyson

White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach. — Michael Eric Dyson

Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible. — Michael Eric Dyson

I guess I'm a Luddite. — Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers. — Michael Eric Dyson

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged. — Michael Eric Dyson

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly. — Michael Eric Dyson

It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others. — Michael Eric Dyson

..And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation. — Michael Eric Dyson

Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression. — Michael Eric Dyson

What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be. — Michael Eric Dyson

We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least the barriers to such success and thriving are completely removed. I think the black narcissism that prevails, along with the stylish materialism and self-satisfied, smug attitudes among many of our upwardly mobile brothers and sisters should be identified and criticized. — Michael Eric Dyson

I received my calling and accepted it at around 18. — Michael Eric Dyson

The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics. — Michael Eric Dyson

I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the less fortunate of our number. — Michael Eric Dyson

Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby." — Michael Eric Dyson

Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting. — Michael Eric Dyson

The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley. — Michael Eric Dyson

I've written a lot of other books and this book [Tears we cannot stop] was different. I couldn't just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach. — Michael Eric Dyson

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches. — Michael Eric Dyson

I have written 13 books, full of my ideas about a variety of issues - from black women, to hip-hop culture, to the civil rights struggle. Even when I address such figures as Tupac Shakur and Bill Cosby, my ideas are quite evident. — Michael Eric Dyson

Black women must help black men understand their full potential lies not in denying black women full access to their humanity and opportunity, but in working diligently to overcome the odds that hamper our progress. Yes, some of that is self-imposed, and we must confront it; and much of it comes from outside. But without courageous and brilliant black women, our communities are greatly diminished. — Michael Eric Dyson

The emphasis on personal responsibility is something we've had in black America from the get-go. Every major leader and intellectual worth her salt has advocated for black folk to better ourselves and push ourselves to the limits of our abilities and gifts. At the same time, we've got to focus on creating a society that recognizes our worth, regardless of race and other factors. — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels. — Michael Eric Dyson

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines. — Michael Eric Dyson

I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric. — Michael Eric Dyson

There are things that you can do on an individual level, even as you continue to fight oppression systemically, that make things a little bit better for an identifiable group. — Michael Eric Dyson

Blackness also has positive dimensions, those that bear the political meanings of African American people, among other blacks, who have struggled for self-determination and freedom for centuries. The absence of such an identity doesn't automatically guarantee that we will be free of the images and ideals that fuel stereotypes about black identity. Changing the name will not alter the reality. — Michael Eric Dyson

I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent. — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm just challenging white supremacy at its intellectual heart every day. It's a pedagogy that I deploy against some of the most vicious resistance to blackness that whiteness is able to throw up. I engage in a lot of intellectual combat with supremacists and with the predicate of white supremacy and white indifference to black identity, and brown and red and yellow identity too, for that matter. — Michael Eric Dyson

I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them. — Michael Eric Dyson

My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me. — Michael Eric Dyson

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power. — Michael Eric Dyson

Life Lessons by Michael Eric Dyson

1. Michael Eric Dyson encourages us to think critically and challenge the status quo in order to create a more equitable and just society.
2. He teaches us to be mindful of our own privilege and to use it to help those who are less fortunate than us.
3. He reminds us that we have a responsibility to use our knowledge and resources to create a better world for all.