Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Beloved, white racial grief erupts when you fear losing your dominance.

The one-drop rule, the notion to racial purists that even a speck of black blood contaminates one’s heritage, has always signified that white America believed that blackness was superior.

The representatives lapsed into calculated forgetting.

But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture. Going back to a time that was great depends on deliberate disremembering.

“What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.”

Instead of “forget it,” there is “deny it.”

Sure, there are no white and black water fountains, but inequality persists.

When it comes to race the past is always present. What Jim Crow achieved in the past through, say, redlining—where services like banking, insurance, health care, and supermarkets are denied to specific racial or ethnic groups—continues to this day. Formal segregation in housing policies may have been struck down, but steering, where real estate brokers direct home buyers toward or away from particular neighborhoods based on race, is as effective as ever. School segregation is no longer the law

terms. It’s a Faustian racial bargain. The third stage of white racial grief, appropriation, looms everywhere.

Timberlake proves that cultural critic Greg Tate is

right: such white stars want everything but the burden of the blackness they sample.

It’s easy to empathize with Shriver; after all, if you only write what you know, then you are left with precious little to write about.

“I don’t see color or race—I see people.”

The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

The way of the racial revisionist, when it comes to black life and history, is, simply, to rewrite it. Their motto is, “It didn’t happen that way.”

Defend the right of the state to do what? To enslave blacks.

From the right wing there is the belief that the Civil War was fought over the ability of individual states to beat back a federal government out to impose its will. From the left wing there’s the belief that the Civil War was a conflict between the planter class and the proletariat. In each case, race as the main reason for the war is skillfully rewritten, or, really, written out. Slavery is rewritten too.

But revisionists would much rather describe the dehumanization of black folk as little more than a commercial transaction.

It’s another way of washing their hands of racial responsibility.

Malcolm X believed in the liberation of black folk from the mental and psychological chains of white supremacy.

The rage that flowed in Malcolm’s veins was the rage against a force of whiteness that aimed

to wash its black kin from the face of the earth.

to dilute it.

To summarize: “Bad stuff happens to everyone.” This argument surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The storm certainly hit black folk, but it hit white folk too. This is the sordid version of reverse American exceptionalism.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who fled from slavery, offered a famous oration on the meaning of Independence Day, asking, “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” The great black poet Langston Hughes grieved in verse, “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”

in 2016 just 22.2 percent of professional administrator positions on National Football League teams were held by people of color. In the NFL’s league office, only 9.4 percent of those with management positions were black in a league where nearly two-thirds of its players are black.

Once they range beyond deference and obedience, they’re out of bounds, and huge penalty flags are thrown.

Was Harrison then suggesting that Kaepernick wasn’t really black because he had no ghetto credibility?

Since that heyday, leagues have begun promoting race-neutral charitable activities. Visiting a sick kid in a hospital is admirable, and a black athlete is often paired with a white child in an innocent, nonconfrontational setting. But that cannot replace speaking on behalf of black kids who are being gunned down in the streets by cops, or who are victims of the failures of the criminal justice system. Social service at times obscures the need for justice by confusing compassion with change. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that charity is a poor substitute for justice.

If you accepted the term nigger, no speech or grammar could rescue you.

Some of you claim that black folk are racists too when they use epithets like honky, redneck, cracker, ofay, gray boy, and the like. But you know that’s a lie, and I’ll tell you why a little later.

A famous black leader told me how he and his young adult peers would rifle through the obituary section in the white papers and gleefully proclaim “another cracker gone.” I heard churchgoing folk who love the Lord sanctify their rage with holy profanity at your barbarous mistreatment or murder of us. “Goddamned crackas. Motherfucking honkeyass ofays. Fuck all of them redneck peckerwoods.”

the knowledge that his son, his family, was in danger—was a black man’s kryptonite.

A man might snap at the awareness that he couldn’t protect his family, not really, not like white men.

Nigger condenses the history of hate and the culture of violence against black folk. When white folk say the word they bridge the gap between themselves and the hateful history it reflects. It links verbal and physical violence. The term is also a form of moral violence. It has to do with the intentions of white folk when they hurl that word in our presence.

Nigger says lynching, castration, rape, rioting, intellectual inferiority, Jim Crow, second-class citizenship, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, police brutality, racial terror, mass incarceration, and more.

The state, in fact, rendered black folk even more vulnerable. White racism was the government’s science project; bigotry was its nightly homework. Evil flashed a white face in a terrorizing crackerocracy, an exuberantly diabolic band of proud haters of black culture composed of the Klan, the White Citizens Council, neo-Confederate outfits, white nationalist groups, and the legions of unaffiliated fellow travelers. Their mottoes differ, but nigger is the rallying cry for all of them. We must effectively respond in our day to the ugly persistence of racism, even if its form has changed. So what are you supposed to do?

You must not only deal with familiar black persons, but with blackness per se, with blackness as a moral arc, with blackness as history and culture, with simple yet profound black humanity. You may discover after all that we, black and white, are far more alike than you suspected—or feared. Your fear that we are just alike may cause you at first to doubt, but then, defensively, to embrace the lie of black inferiority your people have practiced from the start of our experiment in democracy.

We have to know as much as we can know about you to keep you from wrecking our lives because you had a bad day. We have to know all we can know about you to keep you from firing us or gentrifying our communities and shipping us to the outer perimeters of hell. As the creator of a bad racial allegory, you have all of Dante’s rage but none of his poetry.

Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic:

Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks?

that I completely, unforgettably, understood what Baldwin meant when he wrote of his own father that “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” I felt the same about my father.

He was proud of my desire to get more education, yet he lived in a prison of disbelief in his own worth. Therefore he doubted mine too. That he could believe that a white kid was smarter than me because he stepped over a puddle proved how little he believed in black intelligence and how much he bought the lie of white superiority.

That really helps to process the relationship with my father, who was the “muscles” in our family. 2 questions: What do to have to prove in 2019 What do I have to still disprove?

My privilege rests on the idea that I am special, that I am different, that I’m not like “them.” That difference is

partly why I get to address you directly, beloved. Why I am considered more capable of speaking to the problem of race, more articulate than “regular” black folks.

I am like every other black American, a person caught betwe...

My brother is the way America does see blackness—suspect merely for existing, naturally violent, obviously criminal, rightly sentenced, thankfully incarcerated. He is my brother and we are two sides of a family coin, a coin that is both biological and national. I don’t for a moment buy the false dichotomy between us. We are both tied together in a seam of racial destiny as the nigger.

description does fit a few rappers.) Beloved, this is just the tip of the iceberg of hate. This is why I can never pretend that I’m in any way better than the masses of black folk.

education I’ve got, how well I behave, how much compassion I show to white folk, how well-heeled I am in polite company, no matter how articulate I am, I am still just a nigger to so many white folk. And it’s not just the lunatic fringe that swells with bigots. I’m afraid that angry white folk who consider themselves part of the white mainstream have just as much venom and ire. When I used to appear on Fox News pretty regularly with Bill O’Reilly, I begged him to

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 o...