Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

let me start by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white people.

whiteness is made up, and that white history disguised as American history is a fantasy, as much a fantasy as white superiority and white purity. Those are all myths.

So much has been invested in whiteness that it is hard to let it go.

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.

if we constructed it, we can get about the business of deconstructing it.

hope might prevail. If you, my friends, would make a conscious effort to change. If you would stop being white.