Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

(It irks me as a professor to hear folk describe the university as somehow unreal. It may be gilded, or privileged, certainly shielded, but it is no less real than, say, the corporate world, or sports, or the assembly line. We have real conversations, real conflicts, real thoughts, and real bodies to think those thoughts with.)

Your whiteness is a shield that keeps you from knowing what black folk must always know.

And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won’t make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it,

For so many of you, 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.

James Baldwin said it best when he wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror.

Beloved, the way we feel about cops is how many of you feel in the face of terror. And yet, long before 9/11, long before Al-Qaeda, long before ISIS, we felt that too, at your hands, at the hands of your ancestors, at the hands of your kin who are our cops.

The cops and their advocates claim that only a few rogue cops give a bad name to the rest. But isn’t that like claiming that most of one’s cells are healthy and that only a few are cancerous?

In fact, viewing black folk—or brown folk, or gay folk, or poor folk—as the other is the problem.

Honestly, the fact that you do not know real, ordinary, splendid black folk is astonishing. The more black folk you know, the less likely you are to stereotype us. The less you stereotype us, the less likely you are to fear us. The less you fear us, the less likely you are to want to hurt us, or to accept our hurt as the price of your safekeeping. The safer you feel, the safer we’ll be.

if we are to understand America we must understand blackness.