Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

I sometimes think of how the nigger crawled from the newly forming white imagination as a denial of everything that was enlightened and human. I also think about how Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not the monster, but the monster soon came to be identified by his inventor’s name. “Whiteness,” in the same way, may be the true nigger. Stitching together a warped reflection of yourself, each piece a rejected part of your own body, the creation is made from you, not just by you—a despised version of all your imperfections. Like the monster Frankenstein, the nigger is kept animate as much by the white fear of becoming, or, in a manner, of always having been, the thing it hates most, as by a competing fear: that it should lose control of a part of itself, yes, a black part, and a despised part, too. The loss of control is glimpsed in the black desire to be anything except the nigger that whiteness has made black folk out to be.