Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

So what are you supposed to do? My friends, what I need you to do—just for starters—is not act. Not yet. Not first. First I need you to see. I need you to see the pains and possibilities of black life, its virtues and vices, its strengths and weaknesses, its yeses and nos. I need you to see how the cantankerous varieties of black identity have been distorted by seeing black folk collectively as the nigger. It is not a question of simply not saying nigger; you have to stop believing, no matter what, that black folk are niggers and all the term represents. Instead you must swim in the vast ocean of blackness and then realize you have been buoyed all along on its sustaining views of democracy. What would this nation be without the efforts of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., to make it behave according to its ideals? What would it be had not Diane Nash and Fannie Lou Hamer given their all to quench the fires of hate? You must not only deal with familiar black persons, but with blackness per se, with blackness as a moral arc, with blackness as history and culture, with simple yet profound black humanity. You may discover after all that we, black and white, are far more alike than you suspected—or feared. Your fear that we are just alike may cause you at first to doubt, but then, defensively, to embrace the lie of black inferiority your people have practiced from the start of our experiment in democracy.