Michael Eric Dyson is the University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. One website listed the average tenured professor’s 2012 salary at Georgetown at $167,000, three times the median US income. No doubt a professor occupying an elevated position such as Dyson’s, in 2017, earns more. Dyson received his PhD from Princeton, ranked by US News as the best American university, beating out Harvard. Dyson is the author of five bestselling books and the recipient of numerous awards. His three children have six degrees including from Ivy League schools. His son is an anesthesiologist.
Dyson’s 2017 book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America has received over-the-top praise from Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and Michael Medved. Reviews call the book “frank,” “searing,” “urgent,” “eloquent, righteous, and inspired … lyrical.” “Anguish and hurt throb in every word,” along with “brilliance and rectitude.”
Dyson’s main point is that America is a hellhole that dooms black people to failure, silencing, and death, while whites uniformly bask in unearned wealth and good fortune. “You know that white skin is magic.”
Blacks are analogous to captured birds. Whites will decide whether they want, finally, to open their hands and liberate blacks, or just, out of spite, strangle them to death. “It’s in your hands.”
As reparation, whites must hire blacks instead of whites. Whites must pay blacks more money than is appropriate. Whites must give blacks money for school tuition and zoo, museum, and movie admission, and pay for massages and textbooks. White people must also tell every white person they meet that he enjoys white privilege. Dyson provides the script: “Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.”
Tears We Cannot Stop opens and closes with quotes from Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. The first quote, by Morrison, “We flesh. Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh … they’d as soon pick out your eyes … break your mouth … What you scream from it they do not hear.” The closing quote from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”
One can’t debate with an enslaved fictional character; to do so would be unseemly and irrational. Dyson doesn’t open or close with statistics or peer-reviewed scholarship; he opens and closes with works of art that imprison African Americans in stereotypical images of helplessness and suffering, images created by college-educated, professional women who wrote in faux-Ebonics. Walker and Morrison have been embraced and feted by a majority-white academic and literary elite. Between them, they have won every possible prize, including two Pulitzers and a Nobel. In these opening and closing quotes, African Americans sound like the roadshow of Porgy and Bess.
Dyson does not include quotes by actual slaves. Such quotes often include an insistence on human dignity, no matter the circumstances, and an awareness of how complex life can be. Frederick Douglass wrote, “A smile or a tear has not nationality … they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man,” “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” “People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get,” “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future,” and “The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”
Booker T. Washington is a treasure-trove of quotes for Dyson to ponder. “Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition … than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe … This I say, not to justify slavery … but to call attention to a fact.” Note that Douglass and Washington chose to make their points in Standard English.
Another of Dyson’s rhetorical ploys: he prostitutes religion to forfend rational thought. Dyson opens his “Invocation” with the words “Almighty, hear our prayer. Oh God how we suffer.” He closes the book, “Oh, Lord, black folk are everything … we are going nowhere.” In the same way that one can’t debate a fictional character, especially one who merely wants to dance and be loved, and whose eyes evil white people want to poke out, one can’t debate something as sacred as a prayer.
The Old Testament prophets were brazenly courageous. Jeremiah told his fellow Jews exactly where and how they were disobeying God and tempting catastrophe. Dyson cannot breathe a single word of criticism of his fellow African Americans. Dyson never so much as brushes against the New Testament’s love and forgiveness. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” and “Love does not keep account of injuries” are words that do not appear in Dyson’s Bible.
Dyson mentions having once lead a Bible study. “I hammered away at the parallels between sexism and racism” because sexism is bad for “black Christianity.” His emphasis on sexism and racism is truer to identity politics than to the Bible’s larger message. The very concept of “black Christianity” contradicts Galatians 3:28, “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek … you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Whites’ only path to acceptance is to acknowledge how debased they are. “I’m a rich, white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” reports basketball coach Gregg Popovich, as quoted by Dyson. Dyson mentions Christian publisher Jim Wallis who prescribed “repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.” No concordance would turn up any Biblical verses that support “dying to whiteness” as a form of repentance.
Dyson’s prostitution of religion as cover reaches its nadir in blasphemy. He equates the spit of a black girl on a white girl’s body with Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament. The black girl’s spit “may as well have been holy water … Holy Communion … the biggest miracle since you turned water to wine.”
The book is so repetitious one gets a sense of its entire message from two pages of its “Invocation”: Blacks are not free; they are “ensnared.” Whites are “tormentors” and nothing blacks can do will “stop their evil.” Blacks cannot convince whites that “we are your children and don’t deserve this punishment.” Whites are “slaughtering us in the streets” because they want “to remove us from the face of the earth.” Whites “are lying through their teeth.” Whites “are invested in their own privilege” so “they cannot afford to see how much we suffer.” “White folk act like the devil is all in them.” Dyson watches helplessly as racism threatens to snuff the life out of his grandchildren.
