Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Beloved, I am not arguing there is evil magic in white lips to call down violence with words. The word nigger has such fantastically evil resonance because there is a kind of moral onomatopoeia at work: nigger is a word that comes as close as any to suggesting the racial violence that it describes. Nigger says lynching, castration, rape, rioting, intellectual inferiority, Jim Crow, second-class citizenship, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, police brutality, racial terror, mass incarceration, and more. Nigger has no rival. There is no rough or refined equivalence between the term and the many derisive references to white folk. Those terms don’t evoke singularly gruesome actions. Nigger is unique because the menace it implies is portable; it shows up wherever a white tongue is willing to suggest intimidation and destruction. There are no examples of black folk killing white people en masse; terrorizing them with racial violence; shouting “cracker” as they lynch them from trees and then selling postcards to document their colossal crimes. Black folk have not enjoyed the protection of the state to carry out such misdeeds.

The state, in fact, rendered black folk even more vulnerable. White racism was the government’s science project; bigotry was its nightly homework. Evil flashed a white face in a terrorizing crackerocracy, an exuberantly diabolic band of proud haters of black culture composed of the Klan, the White Citizens Council, neo-Confederate outfits, white nationalist groups, and the legions of unaffiliated fellow travelers. Their mottoes differ, but nigger is the rallying cry for all of them. We must effectively respond in our day to the ugly persistence of racism, even if its form has changed.

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 disco...

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 ...

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 ...

We have, most of us, anyway, rejected your imagining and defaming of us as nigger. We have done everything humanly possible to prove that we are not who you say we are. I am from a generation far more willing to make the effort than the one freshly on the scene. Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic: Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks? Your white humanity is forever at stake with such young folk. And you know what, beloved? They have a point. Black folk my age and older have a direct memory of what it means for white folk to be blind and deaf to us even when we stood by the thousands in the streets and screamed our names for the world to hear. “I Am a Man,” we blared through a bullhorn, amplifying both our desperate desire to be recognized and our unknowing sexism. While pleading that the world not be blind to us, we couldn’t see the women by our side. “I Am Somebody,” we insisted, even when it was more aspiration than belief. All of that was our way of saying—in reality, our way of preparing to proclaim—that “Black Lives Matter.”

Beloved, there is something black folk fear, whether you can see it or not, whether some of us black folk will say it or not. Our fear is that you believe, that you insist—finally, tragically, without hesitation, with violent repercussions in tow—that, in all sorts of ways, we are still your nigger.

Like it or not, black humanity has been, and continues to be, the only salvation white American humanity has. Democracy might well be a wounded bird incapable of flight without the poultice of black forgiveness pressed to its wings. When we confront racial catastrophe, black folk insist on fighting back. We have given this country the spiritual will and the moral maturity it lost in the bitter divorce of principle and practice. Our nation can only reach its best destiny when that recognition grounds our shared culture and existence. We want what you want. We want to pursue our dreams without the hindrance of racism. We want to raise our children in safety and send them to good schools. We want our communities to overflow with opportunity and support. We want good jobs and health care. We want gorgeous parks and lovely homes. We want affordable markets and department stores nearby. And we don’t want to die at the hands of either the cops or other black folk.

Beloved, why is it that every time black folk talk about how poorly the cops treat us you say that we should focus instead on how we slaughter each other in the streets every day? Isn’t that like asking the person who tells you that they’re suffering from cancer to focus instead on their diabetes? Your racial bedside manner has always been fairly atrocious. But we are not fooled. You do not bring this up because you’re genuinely concerned. You want to win points in debates. You want to avoid any responsibility for how traumatized our communities are. You want to hide from the horror of cops mowing us down like we’re animals. So you hurl that accusation at us like religion. But there is no righteousness in your retort, no healing in your hubris. We are dying, it is a serious matter, and you must lay down your smug self-satisfaction that we are our own worst enemies and face how you are killing us. Just this once set aside your litany of accusations and listen. Just this once take the side of the true victims of oppression. Just this once please don’t side with the manufacturers and perpetrators of our death. I’ll be honest and admit that there are ways that black folk are doing ourselves in. But I hope you can admit that even those ways are often linked to our gutless embrace of the bigotries you spew.