Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Democracy might well be a wounded bird incapable of flight without the poultice of black forgiveness pressed to its wings. When we confront racial catastrophe, black folk insist on fighting back. We have given this country the spiritual will and the moral maturity it lost in the bitter divorce of principle and practice. Our nation can only reach its best destiny when that recognition grounds our shared culture and existence. We want what you want. We want to pursue

our dreams without the hindrance of racism. We want to raise our children in safety and send them to good schools. We want our communities to overflow with opportunity and support. We want good jobs and health care. We want gorgeous parks and lovely homes. We want affordable markets and department stores nearby. And we don’t want to die at the hands of either the cops or other black folk.

Do you think we like being killed by folk who look like us? Do you think it doesn’t bother us? Our bullets are often aimed at each other because we’re too near the site of pain and heartbreak, frustration and depression.

The Spirit urged me to talk to him. We’d just come from church. Why not call on faith to see us through? “Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this,” I offered, praying it struck a chord of humanity, and, at least, racial intimacy. Thank God it did. “I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he said, his voice trembling, his body language suggesting a growing regret about his action. “But I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat.”

Then our would-be robber delivered a real shock. He revealed the vicious cycle of carnage that makes some people victims and then pushes them to make others its victims, as well. “Besides, last week, somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.” “I tell you what,” I said. “We just came from choir rehearsal. And if you’ll let me reach into my back pocket, I can give you my church bulletin. It has a number you can call to get some help.” He took the bulletin and briefly glanced at it. He looked stumped, perhaps half in disbelief at my desperation, perhaps half believing that I really wanted to help him. I made my final offer. “Look, I only have a dollar thirty-five cents, but I want to give it to you.” “No, man, you need that yourself.” “I insist. Take it, please.” He told us we could go free and to walk to the end of the block. I froze. I didn’t want him to shoot us in the back. I asked him to get on his knees. I don’t quite know why I asked, or why he complied. But, miraculously, he did. I said a very brief prayer for him. I didn’t want to test the Lord’s mercy or the man’s patience. He stayed on his knees as we walked away, unharmed.

White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation. And, beloved, it might surprise you that white folk commit the most violent crimes too. According to FBI statistics, black folk committed 36 percent of violent crime in 2015, while white folk committed 42 percent of violent crimes in the same year. White folk consistently lead all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism. And white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.

You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk. Never mind the fact that its first occupants were the Irish, Poles, Italians—and especially the Jews. Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn’t kill each other.

But there is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities. Take blackness out of the equation and you’d have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities. We know this because big brains and social reformers from the late 1800s well into the 1930s successfully addressed crime waves set in motion, and endured, by poor European immigrants. Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life. These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction. The 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro family—a report by Harvard professor and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that a castrating black matriarchy and a “tangle of pathology” threatened the black family—is a famous example.

due? According to your logic, we should not be concerned with political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm.

Far more white folk kill each other than are killed by terrorists.

Beloved, I must admit that there are ways that black folk do aim hate at each other, ways we do rip each other apart. A lot of it has to do with how we’ve taken into our minds and souls the poisonous bigotry you’ve spread.

See, just as the song in the Broadway play Avenue Q says, ‘We’re all a little bit racist.’” (Of course that’s a horrible misuse of the term. Better to say we’re all just a little bigoted, yes, or prejudiced for certain.

One can only be racist when one has access to coercive power.

The minister who led the charge against me was, like me, a yellow Negro, and by citing my color in his theological brief against me, he shined a light on the deep wound of colorism in black America. The “light, bright and damn near white” black person is often put into conflict with the darker and richer chocolate members of our community. I had seen up close how color-struck black folk are.

It gave me a hint of the psychic costs of black manhood, of thrusting and parrying with the cold facts of white dominance that hushed one’s rage and yet encouraged it to flow against one’s own family.

us. We black folk also viewed his dark skin with cruel disregard. He was the nigger, not just to you, but to us, too, because we have learned to see through your eyes.

In black life light skin is valued because it is closer to your white skin, and

those with it are deemed to be closer to your so-called civilizing influence. That very notion reeks of barbarism, reeks of a crude, primeval equivalence between epidermis and humanity, reeks, therefore, of white supremacy.

Sometimes my father beat us something awful. It was ritual and tradition, of course, in so many of our communities. He got beat, and, therefore, he beat. It had long since passed into rite and folklore, long since been an artifact of the agonizing anthropology of complicated black domestic habits. It had now become part of the art of punishment and control—in part to keep us from being slaughtered in t...

That’s some black-on-black harm you never seem to take credit for. That’s some abuse rising from fear you never seem to take notice of, even a little responsibility for. You ever consider this, beloved? You ever have to apply the cane, or stick, or switch, or belt to your kid’s backside for that reason? You certainly took the high road when it came to football player Adrian Peterson brutally switching his son. But you have no idea of the history of corporal punishment among black folk and some of the reasons it exists. Do you see how this might enrage us against you even more? We are angry that fear leads us to h...

find ways to kill the flesh of discipline...

White folk created the world where black whippin...

Many black folk use the Bible to thunder down judgment on gay

or lesbian folk. We trot out some of the same arguments that were used against black folk by white preachers: that God frowns on their sexual identity; that the Bible says their habits and desires lead right to hell; that their moral corruption is a blight on the community.

If, as Toni Morrison says, it is on the backs of blacks that America has been built, then surely blacks have built other forms of blackness, acceptable blackness, by offering nigger status to those we deem beneath us.

The use of nigger has been eerily consistent in the culture, especially with the presidency of Barack Obama stoking resurgent white panic and the emergence of Donald Trump amplifying white paranoia and racial belligerence. But black folk haven’t stood by passively. A great many of us have tried to rob the word of its essential viciousness by reappropriating it, though, to many black folk, the effort smacks of internalized racist self-hate. They feel the effort is futile, and tips our caps too eagerly to a word that should be banished from the culture. A nigger is a nigger, or a nigga, they say. Beloved, many of you don’t understand why black folk ambushed the word nigger and made something strangely beautiful of it. What’s more, you often appear upset that we appropriate this term while denying you the pleasure of helping us to reshape its use. We strictly forbid you the privilege of participating in our fierce disputes about the word. As for the attempt to make the word palatable in our arenas, you don’t have to know a lot of social theory to know that powerless people often fight power with their words.

Nigger is the white man’s invention; the gender is deliberate here, since this was a white male creation even as white women shared the culture of derision too. Nigga is the black man’s response since black men were most easily seen as nigger. But black women bore an even greater burden with a double portion of slander when they were called “nigger bitch.” Nigger taps into how darkness is linked to hate. Nigga reflects self-love and a chosen identity. Nigga does far more than challenge the white imagination. Nigga also captures class and spatial tensions in black America. Nigga is grounded in the ghetto; it frowns on bourgeois ideals and spits in the face of respectability politics. That’s why an incident in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency resonated so widely. “Yo, Barry. You did it, my nigga.” Larry Wilmore fired a rhetorical shot

Referring to him with a vernacular offshoot of nigger was something altogether different. Letting that be his last word about Obama at a gathering the world paid attention to was beyond the pale.

Black journalists and civil rights leaders chastised Wilmore for breaking black code and saying nigga in mixed company.

We learn how to modify our speech in the face of cops. We temper our passion and modulate our tone so that we barely register as being there. Do you have “the talk” with your kids to warn them within an inch of their lives not to sass the police for fear that they will return home to you in a body bag? I don’t mean the usual conversation all parents have with their kids about respecting the cops. Sheer terror and outright fear motivate our discussions.

If you’re old enough, and your birth certificate says “Negro” like mine does—from the early 1900s to the early 1980s all African American birth certificates labeled us as such—you’ll know it’s the same way we were taught to speak to white folk in the south. You keep that kind of manual in your backpack?

We must believe that cops are gods; we are nothing. And the more we remember our nothingness, become experts in the philosophy of nothingness, the better chance we have to survive. Does any of this sound familiar to you? It is our routine, our daily ritual of survival.

Could you believe that most cops are good and well-intentioned when the history of harm forever hangs above your heads?

You’ve seen the video of the young black man in South Carolina who goes to retrieve his wallet just as the Highway Patrol trooper instructs, and yet is still filled with lead for no other reason than he is who he is—a black male, a ferocious

subversion of all that is decent and humane and worthy of space on earth.

How can we conclude anything different? How can you? If you’re honest you’ll see that the police force is a metaphysical collective with a gift for racial punishment that has never viewed black folk as human beings, because the law that they are charged to enforce has never seen us as human beings....

Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror.

We think of the police who kill us for no good reason as ISIS.

Racial terror is not just an act, but a habit, not luck, but a skill, a genius for snuffing out black life over mundane things—a wallet, some candy, loud music, a cell phone, a toy gun, shopping, the failure to signal, or other minor offenses that white people live to tell us about when they commit them.

The policeman has never been neutral to us. From the start he was not there to protect or serve us, but to protect and serve you, which often meant getting rid of us. The policing of the black body started in slavery when enslaved men and women had handcuffs slapped on their wrists and irons fixed on their legs as they got jammed into the hulls of slave ships.

Jimmie Lee Jackson was a black, unarmed Vietnam War veteran whose murder in a café by white Alabama State trooper James Bonard Fowler in 1965 helped to inspire the Selma to Montgomery marches. It was not until 42 years later in 2007 that Fowler was finally charged with homicide in Jackson’s death, pleading guilty to one count of second-degree manslaughter and serving five months of a six-month sentence. When Fowler shot him, Jackson managed to flee the café, but was clubbed by other state troopers before he was eventually taken to a hospital where he died eight days later. Jackson relayed the story of his shooting and beating to his lawyer, Oscar Adams, in the hospital in the presence of FBI agents. The FBI often dragged their feet on official civil rights investigations and suppressed information about assassination plots against movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who referred in his “I Have a Dream” speech to the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”

This old man was very wise, and he could answer questions that was almost impossible for people to answer. So some people went to him one day, two young people, and said, “We’re going to trick this guy today. We’re going to catch a bird, and we’re going to carry it to this old man. And we’re going to ask him, ‘This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?’ If he says ‘Dead,’ we’re going to turn it loose and let it fly. But if he says, ‘Alive,’ we’re going to crush it.” So they walked up to this old man, and they said, “This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?” He looked at the young people and he smiled. And he said, “It’s in your hands.” —Fannie Lou Hamer

First, my friends, you must make reparation. I know that you may not have followed the fierce debate over reparations,

There are all sorts of ways to make reparation work at the local and individual level. You can hire black folk at your office and pay them slightly better than you would ordinarily pay them. You can pay the black person who cuts your grass double what you might ordinarily pay. Or you can give a deserving black student in your neighborhood, or one you run across in the course of your work, scholarship help. In fact, your religious or civic institution can commit a tenth of its resources to educating black youth.

The point is to be creative in transferring a bit of your resources, even if in modest amounts, to deserving and often struggling descendants of the folk who gave this country its great wealth and whose offspring rescued its reputation for democracy.

Beloved, you must also educate yourselves about black life and culture. Racial literacy is as necessary as it is undervalued.

Beloved, you must not only read about black life, but you must school your white brothers and sisters, your cousins and uncles, your loved ones and friends, and all who will listen to you, about the white elephant in the room—white privilege.

“While it is dangerous to say that all whites have equal access to wealth and education,” one of my white students writes, “the fact of the matter is that white people will not be followed in a store, frisked on a New York sidewalk, or shot by police at the same rate as black people. Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.” You see what my student did there, beloved? He linked white privilege and black oppression, not directly, mind you, but in a way that suggests that white privilege creates opportunities for black oppression to take hold.

Beloved, racism and bigotry are ugly, uncomfortable issues to grapple with. But if you don’t address them, you reinforce the privilege of not having to face up to the truth.

Beloved, your participation in protests, rallies, local community meetings, and the like makes a huge difference. When we gather to express grief, outrage, and dissent, your presence sends the signal that this is not “just a black thing.” It is, instead, an American thing.

You must grapple with how your participation isn’t just to aid black and brown folk, though that is indeed admirable. It is also to fulfill your sense of destiny. One of your great prophets, Jim Wallis, the founder and leader of the Washington, D.C.–based Christian community called Sojourners, hammered this home recently. Wallis quotes black theologian James Cone who “talks about ‘repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.’ I want to say white Christians