Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

In 1966 King said in Mississippi that our nation “has a choice. Either you give the Negro his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continual social disruption and chaos. America, which will you choose?”

all with one goal: to champion their arrival as Americans. That’s how you went from being just Irish, just Italian, just Polish, or just Jewish to becoming white. So please don’t deny this when you approach me to tell me about how your experience as a white ethnic parallels my experience as an African-American. The comparison ends at the hyphen.

Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.

The only way to save our nation, and, yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports.

You can let go of whiteness when you see it as a moral choice, an ideology, a politic, a terribly fearful reaction to the thing it hates the most but can least afford to do without: the black people it helped to will into existence. White or black identity is nothing without the people and forces that make it true. White and black folk are bound together, even when we breathe very different meanings into race. *

But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement.

History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.

you also know that whiteness for the most part remains invisible to many white folk.

to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.

I asked him not only to challenge white privilege, but also to resist the narcissism that celebrates one’s challenge to whiteness rather than siding with those who are its steady victims.

Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.

It is best to think of systems and not individuals when it comes to racial benefit in white America. Thinking of it in individual terms removes blame from many of you who are present beneficiaries of past behavior.

A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color. It’s what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call “white privilege.”

Whiteness can no longer afford to hog the world to itself or claim that its burdens are the burdens of the universe. You must repent of your whiteness, which means repenting of your catastrophic investment in false grievances and artificial claims of injury. You must reject the easy scapegoating of black folk for white failures, white disappointments, and white exploitation.

To be blunt, you are emotionally immature about race. Some of you are rightly appalled at the flash of white racial demagoguery. Yet you have little curiosity about the complicated forces of race. You have no idea that your whiteness and your American identity have become fatally intertwined; they are virtually indistinguishable. Any criticism of the nation is heard as an attack on your identity.

Your feelings get hurt when we tell you that you’re white, and that your whiteness makes a difference in how you’re treated. You get upset when we tell you that whiteness has often been damaging and toxic.

You often deem black dissent as disloyalty to America. But that black dissent may yet redeem a white innocence that threatens the nation’s moral and patriotic health.

White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt.

The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Whiteness becomes a mob of innocence and it responds like a mob to a call for black justice. It responds with riot gear, tear gas, clubs, arrests, Tasers, rubber bullets, and real bullets too. It responds with a collective no. In that moment of mob innocence, it truly believes that if one police officer is indicted, whiteness itself is indicted. If one mass shooter at a black church is brutalized or injured before he can reach a fair trial, then whiteness itself is injured.

It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life. This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity. The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, “Yes, you’re right. In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours.” But that is a tough thing for most of you to do.

what it means to be white is what it means to be American, and vice versa; your American identity is indissolubly linked to your whiteness. It is a possessive whiteness, too, one that hogs to itself the meanings of democracy.

Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism, and, whether you know it or not, a white nationalism at that. There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.”

Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values.

In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot.

The worship of the flag is, too, a form of nationalist idolatry. It is not respectful love. It confuses the cloth with conviction. The power doesn’t reside in the flag; it resides in the ideals to which the flag points. The worship of the flag gets us nowhere,

What can lift the Stars and Stripes higher are the real-life practices that make that flag and that song meaningful. If we cite the Bible, and yet fail to live according to its codes, the Bible becomes just another book. But when we live it, it becomes powerful. If you believe it, the words of scripture say that we become living epistles in whose life others read the presence of God.

“I have never seen a guy so hated by front office guys as Kaepernick.” As long as black athletes keep their mouths shut and play the game, they’re fine. Once they range beyond deference and obedience, they’re out of bounds, and huge penalty flags are thrown.

criticizing police brutality is said to be hating law enforcement. Sitting during the national anthem is said to be hating America. This sophomoric approach will remain a roadblock to genuine racial engagement until it is replaced by a deeper, more humane, more sophisticated understanding of the issue of race.

The greatest mark of our humanity and character shows when we are concerned about others beyond our circle.

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.

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.

According to FBI statistics, black folk committed 36 percent of violent crime in 2015, while white folk committed 42 percent of violent crimes in the same year. White folk consistently lead all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism. And white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.

Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.”

If white folk refuse to name white privilege for what it is, then it is more likely that you will ignore how black inequality, black suffering, exists all around you.

When we gather to express grief, outrage, and dissent, your presence sends the signal that this is not “just a black thing.” It is, instead, an American thing.

Your presence adds greater moral weight to the gathering. It shouldn’t have to be that way, but for now, it is.

One of your great prophets, Jim Wallis, the founder and leader of the Washington, D.C.–based Christian community called Sojourners, hammered this home recently. Wallis quotes black theologian James Cone who “talks about ‘repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.’ I want to say white Christians have been separated from God by the idolatry of whiteness.

Whether one liked or loathed Barack Obama’s politics, there is no denying that he is one of the most profound, impressive, gifted, and inspiring Americans this nation has seen in quite some time. And yet there was a relentless attempt to make him the “other.” The collective effort to deprive Obama of his legitimacy, of his citizenship, of his humanity, scarred the body politic and did great damage to our efforts to move this country beyond its heinous racial history.

Beloved, your voices are crucial because the doubt of black humanity, the skepticism of black intelligence, and the denial of the worth of black bodies linger in our cultural unconscious and shadow our national politics. If you challenge white ignorance, or indifference, to the plight of people of color, it will lend our cause needed legitimacy.

Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness. The siege of hate will not end until white folk imagine themselves as black folk—vulnerable despite our virtues.

Only when you see black folk as we are, and imagine yourselves as we have to live our lives, only then will the suffering stop, the hurt cease, the pain go away. VII.

Whether he wishes to be or not, Donald Trump is the epitome, not only of white innocence and white privilege, but of white power, white rage, and, yes, even of white supremacy.

At the time when the slaves in America were without any excuse for hope and they could see nothing before them but the long interminable cotton rows and the fierce sun and the lash of the overseer, what did they do? They declared that God was not through. They said, “We cannot be prisoners of this event. We must not scale down the horizon of our hopes and our dreams and our yearnings to the level of the event of our lives.” So they lived through their tragic moment until at last they came out on the other side, saluting the fulfillment of their hopes and their faith.

Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.