Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

say on air to his sizable audience that even though he disagreed with me, they shouldn’t send me hate mail and call me “nigger.” He never made that plea. His silence reinforced the racial social contract forged by angry whiteness. And yet we have the ability to shatter that social contract. You must stop believing that you can’t understand us, when, in fact, you choose not to understand us. You must stop seeing us as monolithic and therefore fundamentally, irrevocably different from you when we are singular and exceptional in all ways. Just like you. Our troubles will only cease when you stop believing what you know is untrue: that we are always poor despite our home-buying drive that makes you flee to the suburbs. When you stop believing that we are radical when we can be more conservative than you, that we are one color when we are a plethora of shades, and that we are related to each other and not you when you are related to us in more ways than you can count or may care to know. We are, finally, not your nigger, not in the best world we can create together.