Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

American history is the history of black subjugation. The Constitution is a racially hypocritical work of genius. The north and the south are divided because of us. The history of the twentieth century in America is the history of our struggle against white America. And yet nowhere, apart from South Africa under apartheid, is the omission of black folk from history as glaring an omission. Our presence is so saturating, so embedded, so inextricable, that white America’s most reactionary, racist identities revolve around us—the Klan rally is grievous testimony to ineradicable black identity. And the most intimate and industrious spaces in white America, from the kitchen to the construction site, rest on our labor. There is no getting around blackness. In slavery, it was the intensity of our proximity—of white and black—that defined us. In that sense whiteness and blackness are an American invention. Our agency, our story, is linked to your history, your story. Black and white together.