Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the … need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel … that their white skin ordained them to be first. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

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.