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 we much we suffer? But most of all, Oh God, how can we keep racism from strangling every bit of hope left in our bodies and minds?

Oh God, I pray for all children who have to endure the curse of bigotry. It is the most wretched feeling of helplessness when one’s children suffer that fate.

But there is never a good time to be hated because of a small and insignificant thing like the color of your skin. There is never a good time to know that for many white folk your blackness makes you Old Lucifer himself.

Don’t let it happen, Lord, please don’t let it happen. Oh Lord, I cannot bear the thought of seeing another black person perish because of the weaponized fear and armed hostility of a society that hates black folk in its guts. It can happen to any of us. It can happen to all of us. That is why we are all scared, Lord.

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

Lord, convict this nation as never before. Let our lives testify to your majesty, your love, your grace—and may this land know your displeasure, taste your holy wrath, for killing us like pigs without conscience. Let this nation repent of its murderous ways. Only then will we even believe that white folk know the God who plants a foot on earth and regulates the wheel of time and circumstance. Until then, Oh Lord, give us the courage to tell the truth to white folk who need it more than air itself—who, we pray, will come to hunger for it more than they hunger for our death.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is the most quoted black man on the planet. His words are like scripture to you and, yes, to us too. His name is evoked, his speech referenced, during every racial crisis we confront. He has become the language of race itself. He is, too, the history of black America in a dark suit. But he is more than that. He is the struggle and suffering of our people distilled to a bullet in Memphis. King’s martyrdom made him less a man, more a symbol, arguably a civic deity. But there are perils to hero-worship. His words get plucked from their original contexts, his ideas twisted beyond recognition. America has washed the grit from his rhetoric.

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.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King said. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” We are “perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

King said that black folk couldn’t trust America and compared us to the Japanese who had been interned in concentration camps in World War II. “And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the forties . . . will put black people in a concentration camp. And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.” Here King reverted to black vernacular to forge his link with the black folk whose comfort he sought as he got blasted in white America for criticizing the Vietnam War and for fighting to get rid of inequality. 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.” That is why King is important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people. He spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.

Beloved, let me start by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white people. And yet so many of them, so many of you, exist. Please hear me out. I know you’re flesh and blood. I know that you use language and forks and knives. I’m not talking about your bodies or your garages or your grocery stores. 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.

Until you make whiteness give up its secrets none of us will get very far. Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are. Of course the paradox is that even though whiteness is not real it is still true. I mean true as a force to be reckoned with. It is true because it has the power to make us believe it is real and to punish those who doubt its magic. Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive. It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.

Whiteness has only two modes: it either converts or destroys.

One thing you must understand, beloved, is that whiteness isn’t a solo act. It’s got a supporting cast. Lots of other things got created to uphold and justify whiteness. None was more seductive or necessary than the idea of American history. It may be hard for many of you to concede this. You think of history as a realm of complete objectivity. You think there are such things as indisputable facts, and those facts are woven together by neutral observers in a compelling story that is told as history. You think historians belong to a guild of chroniclers whose work is separate from what the culture considers important. You think they abide by the line from the sixties television series Dragnet, whose star character, the police sergeant Joe Friday, says famously, and dryly, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” 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.

In the end, history is never just what the people who experience it say it is. That’s particularly true if those people are not in power, or if their voices, or their view of things, run counter to what the larger culture thinks is true—in short, what the larger culture thinks is valuable, justifiable, even righteous. The winners, alas, still write history. To say this out loud, in this day and age, when whiteness has congratulated itself for its tolerance of other cultures and peoples, is to invite real resistance from white America.

Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history. You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others.

It has been striking, too, to observe whites for whom their whiteness isn’t a passport to riches, whites for whom whiteness offers no material reward. But there is a psychological and social advantage in not being thought of as black; poor whites seem to say, “At least there’s a nigger beneath me.” And it’s a way for poor whites to be of value to richer whites, especially when poor whites agree that black folk are the source of their trouble—not the corporate behavior of wealthier whites who hurt black and white folk alike. It’s a way to bond beyond class. It’s a way for working class whites to experience momentary prestige in the eyes of richer whites. And there are a lot of privileges that white folk get that don’t depend on cash.

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. But that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t have material consequence and empirical weight. It simply means that if we constructed it, we can get about the business of deconstructing it.

to be black in America means always taking in views we disagree with, not out of altruism, but out of necessity and the impulse to survive.

Real American history is the sticky web in which black and white are stuck together. Stop trying to pretend that you don’t know this. You can kill us, even brutalize us, but history makes escape from us impossible. An even greater fear lurks barely beneath the surface. What horrifies many of you is that America, at its root, has been in part made by blackness. God forbid, but it may in part be black. Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn’t even exist without us. That’s why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president’s supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump’s victory was hardly surprising.

White America, you deliberately forget how whiteness caused black suffering. And it shows in the strangest ways. You forget how you kept black folk poor as sharecroppers. You forget how you kept us out of your classrooms and in subpar schools. You forget how you denied us jobs, and when we got them, how you denied us promotions. You forget how you kept us out of the suburbs, and now that you’re gentrifying our inner city neighborhoods, you’re pushing us to the suburbs. You forget that you kept us from voting, and then blamed us for being lackadaisical at the polls.

White denial thrives on shifts and pivots. “It was my ancestors, not me, who did this to you.” But what looks like confession is really denial. The “them, not me” defense denies how the problem persists in the present day. It is best to think of systems and not individuals when it comes to racial benefit in white America. Thinking of it in individual terms removes blame from many of you who are present beneficiaries of past behavior. The institutions of national life favor your success, whether that means you get better schools and more jobs, or less punishment and less jail. Not because you’re necessarily smarter, or better behaved, but because being white offers you benefits, understanding, and forgiveness where needed. A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color. It’s what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call “white privilege.”

White privilege is a self-selecting tool that keeps you from having to compete with the best.

Whiteness is having all the advantages on your side—the referees blowing the whistle for you, the arena packed with only your fans. In fact, whiteness means you never even have to play the game at all, at least not in head-to-head matchups with the talent and skill of black folk. You’ve been handed a history where you got most of the land, made most of the money, got most of the presumptions of goodness, and innocence, and intelligence, and thrift, and genius—and just about everything that is edifying and white. So it’s hard to stomach your gripes about the few concessions—surely not advantages—to black folk and other folk of color that are suggested in affirmative action. And the irony is that, in aggregate, when we add in white women and other abled folk, it is white folk who are the overwhelming beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Another way you dilute black history is to make yourselves the heroes of our struggles. You argue that there have always been good white folk helping us out. Let’s just call it dilution through distortion. It is the sting of noblesse oblige. Just look at the movies. Films about slavery must feature a sympathetic white character who wants black folk to be free. John Quincy Adams must be the real hero of Amistad, since Cinque couldn’t rebel effectively without help from his great white defenders. Ghosts of Mississippi, about the murder of Medgar Evers, highlights the heroic white prosecutor, Bobby DeLaughter, who fought to open the case, and much less the brave black widow, Myrlie Evers, who fought white supremacy to make sure he paid attention. Mississippi Burning, supposedly about the killing of three civil rights workers in the sixties, celebrates two white FBI agents, heroes in a state where white terror rarely had better allies than silent white law enforcement or brutal local police. If such portrayals might be laid at the feet of last century’s retrograde racial politics, the present is also flush with white savior movies.

But too often white folk want to be treated with kid gloves, or treated like adolescents who can’t take the truth of grownup racial history. So we have to spoon-feed you that truth and put your white faces in our stories to make you see them, perhaps like them, or at least to consider them legitimate and worthy of your attention. Appealing to your ego to protect our backsides, that’s the bargain many of us are forced to make.

Many of you are “shocked, shocked!” that black folk have taken to reminding you that “Black Lives Matter.” Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged. That’s because you’re used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge. 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.

Beloved, you must give up myths about yourself, about your history. That you are resolutely individual, and not part of a group. That you pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps. You must also forcefully, and finally, come face-to-face with the black America you have insisted on seeing through stereotype and fear. Whiteness can no longer afford to hog the world to itself or claim that its burdens are the burdens of the universe. You must repent of your whiteness, which means repenting of your catastrophic investment in false grievances and artificial claims of injury. You must reject the easy scapegoating of black folk for white failures, white disappointments, and white exploitation.

Beloved, you are ensnared in one of the bitterest paradoxes of our day. You say we black folk are thin-skinned about race. You say a new generation of black activists focus too much on trendy terms like “micro-aggressions.” You say they are too sensitive to “trigger warnings.” You claim they are too insistent on safe spaces and guarding against hateful speech that hurts their feelings. You argue that all of us are too politically correct. And yet you can barely tolerate any challenge to your thinking on race. I say thinking, my friends, though that is being kind. Many of you hardly think of race. You shield yourselves from what you don’t want to understand. You reveal your brute strength in one contemptible display of power after the next, and yet you claim that we reap benefit by playing the victim. To be blunt, you are emotionally immature about race. Some of you are rightly appalled at the flash of white racial demagoguery. Yet you have little curiosity about the complicated forces of race. You have no idea that your whiteness and your American identity have become fatally intertwined; they are virtually indistinguishable. Any criticism of the nation is heard as an attack on your identity. But, my friends, your innocent whiteness is too costly to maintain. We are forced to be gentle with you, which is another way of saying we are forced to lie to you. We must let you down easy, you, the powerful partner in our fraught relationship. Your feelings get hurt when we tell yo...

White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situation. I have seen this in many lectures I’ve given over the years. When many white folk disagree, or feel uncomfortable, they get up and walk out of the room. Black folk and other people of color rarely exercise that option. We don’t usually believe that doing so would solve anything. We don’t trust that once we leave the room the right thing will be done. Plus we’ve fought so hard to get into most rooms that a little discomfort is hardly a reason to drive us from the premises. Such rooms likely affect our destinies, something that many white folk needn’t worry about, because they have access to so many other rooms just like the ones they are leaving.

The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

If white guilt is real, so is black guilt, though it is quite different and has its own history. Black bodies that were captured and enslaved reached American shores half dead and soaked in racial guilt. They were guilty of their blackness, guilty of being dangerously different. They were guilty of resisting the loss of their freedom, guilty of their rage at injustice, guilty of trying to escape, guilty of the insubordination of indignation. They were guilty in every way of every crime, and whiteness, in adjudicating that guilt, told itself the very same lie every abusive parent, every batterer, and every spouse killer has told their victim throughout space and time: you made me do it.

Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life. This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity. The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.” But that is a tough thing for most of you to do.

Of course it is hard to undo an entire life of innocence and the privileges it brings. And so you play a game. You pretend that by accountability we mean that you are guilty in a very specific way of some heinous injury. For instance, when we speak of affirmative action, we are not saying that you are individually responsible for the bulwark of white privilege on which it rests. We are saying, however, that you ought to be honest about how you benefit from getting a good education and a great job because you’re white. To twist that into the attempt to prosecute a case against all of white privilege through your individual story is an irresponsible ruse, and you know it, and yet you continue. There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight. You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective. By overdramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity. By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence. By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.

Institutional racism is a system of ingrained social practices that perpetuate and preserve racial hierarchy. Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent.

Many are driven by rage that for eight years a black man represented a nation that once held black folk in chains and that still depends on the law to check black social and political aspirations. Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven’t seen since the height of the civil rights movement. Trump, more than anything else, signifies the undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama’s presidency. He manipulates a confused and self-pitying white public.

What we did not fully understand, or account for, is the deep-seated, intractable anger of the white Americans who never viewed Obama as either fully American or quite human. Donald Trump has exploited these people, promised them a different transformation, one that returns the country to what they would like to believe it once was: theirs. This is the naked, unapologetic face of white innocence on steroids. We have moved backward in so many ways since the high point of Obama’s first election.

Kaepernick has been criticized for his lack of patriotism. The accusation is nothing new. Black folk have been viewed suspiciously throughout American history because of a willingness to be critical of the nation even as they love and embrace it. How many of you who claim that Kaepernick is unpatriotic realize that many black men put on an American uniform and fought overseas, only to return home to be spurned and denied the rights for which they fought? How many of you realize that black soldiers who had fought valiantly for American liberties sometimes returned home to die on the lynching tree because racist whites resented them for wearing the uniform or hoisting the American flag? How many of you know that in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, during a Boston City Hall demonstration against court-ordered busing, a white student protester turned an American flag, tied to a pole, into a weapon to viciously assault Ted Landsmark, a black lawyer?

The opposition to black displays of dissent rests on a faulty premise and a confusion of terms. Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism, and, whether you know it or not, a white nationalism at that. There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it.

Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected.

Beloved, there appears in this flap to be a confusion of symbol and substance. The worship of the flag is, too, a form of nationalist idolatry. It is not respectful love. It confuses the cloth with conviction. The power doesn’t reside in the flag; it resides in the ideals to which the flag points.

It should be clear to you, my friends, that American sports, despite all of the black bodies that make it go, is still a profoundly white enterprise. Surely you must see that it is only the court or the playing field that is integrated. Nearly 70 percent of football players are black; the NBA is 80 percent black. But the NFL’s front offices in particular teem with white men whose outdated viewpoints and narrow understandings of race—and at times bigoted perspectives—hamper true progress. The players in football and basketball may be overwhelmingly black—and in the case of baseball, increasingly Latino—but the front offices of major American sports are a white man’s game.

according to sports website Deadspin, anonymous NFL executives (it is interesting that they will not own up in name) say they don’t want Kaepernick near their teams because he is a traitor and has no respect for our country, and “[expletive] that guy.” Others state, “I have never seen a guy so hated by front office guys as Kaepernick.” As long as black athletes keep their mouths shut and play the game, they’re fine. Once they range beyond deference and obedience, they’re out of bounds, and huge penalty flags are thrown.

Of course, the same astonishment and anger also greets those blacks who protest in the streets and are said to be disrespecting the police. The two are yoked: criticizing police brutality is said to be hating law enforcement. Sitting during the national anthem is said to be hating America. This sophomoric approach will remain a roadblock to genuine racial engagement until it is replaced by a deeper, more humane, more sophisticated understanding of the issue of race. The silence of white athletes must be challenged too. Prominent white athletes shouldn’t leave Kaepernick out on a limb by himself. Those who are socially aware should speak up and challenge the narrow perspectives and white privilege that protects them. They must at least be asked to do so. The unawake and deeply apolitical black athletes, and the ones who mimic the conservative values of the white mainstream, must be called out too. The best of our athletes have understood their responsibility to represent their people. They understood that their privileges meant nothing if others couldn’t enjoy them as well. They knew that if their kin and community were disrespected, it was only a matter of time before they were too. They could not justify remaining silent by making great sums of money and being embraced by the dominant culture while the masses of black people suffered. We have seen black athletes turning away from black suffering because they believed they were merely individuals, and not also part of a gr...

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.

The status quo always favors neutrality, which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change.

Beloved, your white innocence is a burden to you, a burden to the nation, a burden to our progress. It is time to let it go, to let it die in place of the black bodies that it wills into nonbeing. In its place should rise a curiosity, but even more, a genuine desire to know and understand just what it means to be black in America.

In that moment I inherited black intuition, a sense about the world that outpaced my knowledge of it. It was black intuition that, in retrospect, was inevitable because all black people get it at one time or another. It is passed down from generation to generation in the cellular memory of our vulnerable black bodies. I got my innocence snatched from me, with one word, more abruptly and years earlier than white children lose theirs. And for all that my own story is specific, it is the opposite of unique. * * * Nigger.

You are proud of your principled stand against the use of hateful language. If the word must be referenced, it needs to be verbally castrated, stripped of its hostile spelling and snipped into harmless abbreviation. Nigger limps into the “N word.” My Lord, how you contort language; my God, how we demand that you do. You bend over backward grammatically to avoid the appearance that you for one moment tolerate bigotry. Yet the bigotry the word refers to remains in place. It is understandable that many of you cannot say that word, at least not in public, and never in front of black folk. We have made it clear, well, at least most of us, that we find it unacceptable for white folk to say it under any conditions. But despite all your effort and care, the word is still out there, still wreaking havoc, even when it’s not being spoken.