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?

Black educational advance will not keep a cop with a terminal degree of black revulsion from aiming his ignorance at my children’s bodies.

They wring their hands in frustration to prove that they empathize with our plight—that is, those who care enough to do so—and then throw them up in surrender.

What we mostly hear is deafening silence. What we mostly see is crushing indifference.

He understood what white folk could hear; he knew what you dared not listen to. He knew what you could bear to know. He understood the white psyche and when and how to pressure you to do the right thing.

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.

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

Until you make whiteness give up its secrets none of us will get very far.

My friends, when you have to confront identities or experiences that don’t fit your view of the world, you fall back on preconceived notions that are no more real than the whiteness I’ve described.

You believe you are acting and thinking neutrally, objectively, without preference for one group or the next, including your own. You see yourselves as colorless until black folk dump the garbage of race on your heads. At your best moments you may concede that you started the race game, but you swear to the God you love that it is we black folk who keep it going.

It is hard for you to give up this willful ignorance. It is a drug. It is privilege and addiction. Your whiteness is a shield that keeps you from knowing what black folk must always know.

Whiteness long ago, at least in America, shed its ethnic skin and struck a universal pose. Whiteness never had to announce its whiteness, never had to promote or celebrate its unique features.

And there are a lot of privileges that white folk get that don’t depend on cash. The greatest one may be getting stopped by a cop and living to talk about it.

And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.

Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.

President Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember.

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

You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don’t. Black lives were excluded from the start. The reason “Black Lives Matter” needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn’t tell black stories. The founding documents of American society didn’t include black life. When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings.

Just this once set aside your litany of accusations and listen. Just this once take the side of the true victims of oppression.

Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness.