Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Yet many of you, beloved—honestly, it may be most of you—pretend not to know any of this. It may be that you don’t know many of us. You’ve got one, two, perhaps three really good black friends. Maybe you’re not pretending. Maybe you don’t know because you don’t want to know. Maybe it’s worse. You don’t have to know. Your life hasn’t depended, like ours has, on knowing what the “other” likes or dislikes. Black folk have had to know white culture inside out. We know what coffee you like, what mood you’re in, whether you’ll be nasty or nice to us on the subway. We know just by how you glance at us as you interview us if we’ll get that job. We know the fear you feel when we get on the elevator, so we whistle Vivaldi or the Andy Griffith theme song to put you at ease. Although, just to spook you, we sometimes ask the black person we’re with how he’s adjusting to life after being locked up for murder for the last 20 years. We know the way you clinch your white girlfriend a bit tighter when our virility marches up on you unannounced, and the woman on your arm, you fear, will want to be in our arms. So we act less threatening. 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.