Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

How can we possibly combat the blindness of white men and women who are so deeply invested in their own privilege that they cannot afford to see how much we suffer? But

His words get plucked from their original contexts,

ideas twisted beyond recognition. America

has washed the grit from hi...

He said the toughest things about you in sacred black spaces.

Early in his career King believed in the essential goodness of white America. He trusted most whites to put away their bigotry in the face of black suffering. In the last three years of his life he grew far more skeptical of the ability or willingness of white folk to change. He concluded, sadly, that most whites are unconscious racists.

This is civic Holy Writ; this is political scripture.

In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a “nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to

do.” Before his own Atlanta congregation in 1968 King declared that for black folk the Declaration of Independence “has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.”

And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.”

King concluded that black suffering has generated a “terrible ambivalence in the soul of white America.”

In 1966 King said in Mississippi that our nation “has a choice. Either you give the Negro his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continual social disruption and chaos. America, which will you choose?” In 1967 King also declared that the “fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans . . . to genuine equality for Negroes.” And just two weeks before his death, he announced, with a broken heart, “Yes it is true . . . America is a racist country.”

[T]he destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact. —Alexis de Tocqueville

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.

whiteness is ...

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.

It helped the steady climb of European cultures to dominance over the long haul of history.

So please don’t deny this when you approach me to tell me about how your experience as a white ethnic

parallels my experience as an African-American. The comparison ends at the hyphen.

Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.

The white people at my college saw me as a trespasser.

The only way to save our nation, and, yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports.

I came to understand Ralph Ellison’s meaning when his unnamed character says, in the fourth line of Invisible Man, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement.

My dear friends, please try to understand that whiteness is limitless possibility. It is universal and invisible. That’s why many of you are offended by any reference to race.

King’s audience was predominantly black, mine mostly white. In his 1961 speech “The American Dream,” King said that “America is essentially a dream, a dream as yet unfulfilled.” Two years later at the Lincoln Memorial King famously shared

his dream with the nation. Four years after that, King declared that his dream had turned into a nightmare of church bombings, ghetto poverty, riots, and war.

I challenged the black students to do better than Jordan and remember to help other blacks attain the American dream too.

I suppose it’s racial progress of a sort when the black guy is accused of

speaking over the heads of white folk.

“But if America is not more than Africa, if Christmas is not more than Kwanzaa, if William Shakespeare is not more than Maya Angelou, then Dyson is not less than Demosthenes.” Then the kicker: “Chapel Hill, welcome to the Third World.” Whiteness had been challenged at its intellectual and institutional heart.

The Simpson verdict made black folk lie too. I’m not just telling you this now, my friends. I said it then to O.J.’s impossibly beautiful lawyer Johnnie Cochran. I know a lot of you hated him because he beat you at your own game. He sold his vision of history as the one that made the most sense to the group of people, his group of people, on that jury, whose decision, for once, mattered most. That’s usually how whiteness operates in a nutshell. But this time, for a glancing moment, whiteness got coopted by a devilishly handsome chocolate barrister whose smooth words and hypnotic

cadence left the jury and nation spellbound.

A few days later I saw Johnnie Cochran. “Hey man, why in the hell did you give O.J. my number?” I asked in only half-feigned outrage. I knew that Johnnie was the only way his most famous client got those digits. “Professor, he just wanted to speak to you,” Cochran said as he flashed that million-dollar smile of his. “He had me shook,” I told Johnnie, lapsing into black vernacular. “I know he kill white people, but do he kill black people too? I know you his lawyer, and you can’t say nothing, man, but you know he killed them people.” Cochran just laughed.

If a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police

couldn’t convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.

Here blackness operated like whiteness does. The

It seemed to black folk that the only way to combat white privilege was with the exercise of a little black privilege.

You didn’t get mad when all of those white folk who killed black folk got away with murder in the sixties. Byron De La Beckwith bragged for years about killing Medgar Evers in 1963. He was finally convicted in 1994.

The men who killed Emmett Till got off scot-free, even though everybody knew they

lynched that poo...

The Simpson verdict was your forced atonement.

Even Clarence Thomas is blacker than O.J. It

You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history.

Yet you also know that whiteness for the most part remains invisible to many white folk.

After more than a century of enlightened study we know that race is not just

something that falls from the sky; it is, as the anthropologists say, a fabricated idea.

There is often sorrow and anguish in white America when blackness comes in the room. It gives you a bad case of what can only be called, colloquially, the racial blues, but more formally, let’s name it C.H.E.A.T. (Chronic Historical Evasion and Trickery) disorder.

So the quicker you admit you’re a (victim of) C.H.E.A.T., that you’ve got it bad and that ain’t good, the better off you will be, and the rest of us will be too. If not treated early on, C.H.E.A.T. leads to other disorders, including F.A.K.E. (Finding Alternative Knowledge Elusive), F.O.O.L. (Forsaking Others’ Outstanding Literacy), and L.I.E. (Lacking Introspection Entirely).