Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them . . . The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro . . . He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. —James Baldwin

It was at that moment that the force of everything rained down on Mwata. The cop’s tone was threatening, his hand was on his gun, and Mosi had awakened from sleep to see his father being disrespected and threatened by an officer of the law. Fear struck Mwata hard. He glanced at his son in the rearview mirror and had one thought. I don’t want to die tonight. I don’t want my son to see me shot. That brings tears to my eyes even as I chant this prayer. Even as I ask you, Oh God, to give me the strength to soldier on. What a chilling recognition of the high cost for such a simple offense, all because an enraged white male cop was feeling his oats and seeking to humiliate my son. All because he could get away with it. Even if my son had been guilty, his crime wouldn’t have merited the implied threat of lethal force.

So many whites say they hate the quotas they associate with affirmative action, but quotas don’t seem to bother the white folk in blue who can’t get enough of them as they harass one black citizen after another.

To this day my grandson is worried every time he sees a cop. He fears the cops will try to arrest him and his father. He can’t understand why the color of his skin is a reason to be targeted by the police. Mosi is only seven years old.

Lord, what are we to do? When I look at Mosi and my other grandchildren, Layla and Maxem, all beautiful, all bright, all full of life, I swear to you, Oh Lord, it fills me with fear, and then anger, and grief, to think that some son of a bitch with a badge and a gun could just take their lives, take our lives, as if it means nothing. I am beyond rage, Oh Lord, at the utter complicity of even good white folk who claim that they care, and yet their voices don’t ring out loudly and consistently against an injustice so grave that it sends us to our graves with frightening frequency. They wring their hands in frustration to prove that they empathize with our plight—that is, those who care enough to do so—and then throw them up in surrender. What we mostly hear is deafening silence. What we mostly se...

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.

King’s martyrdom made him less a man, more a symbol, arguably a civic deity. But there are perils to hero-worship. His words get plucked from their original contexts, his ideas twisted beyond recognition. America has washed the grit from his rhetoric.

Early in his career King believed in the essential goodness of white America. He trusted most whites to put away their bigotry in the face of black suffering. In the last three years of his life he grew far more skeptical of the ability or willingness of white folk to change. He concluded, sadly, that most whites are unconscious racists.

Let us now read from the Book of King. “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King said. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” We are “perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

And just two weeks before his death, he announced, with a broken heart, “Yes it is true . . . America is a racist country.” That is why King is important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people. He spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

Whiteness forged togetherness among groups in reverse, breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was cut off from the old tongue and connected to the new land. So groups that were often at each other’s throats learned to team up in the new world around whiteness. The battle to become American forced groups to cheat on their old selves and romance new selves. Old tribe for new tribe; old language for new language; old country for new one. The WASPs stung first, but the Italians landed plenty of blows, the Irish fought bare fisted, the Poles grimaced and bore in, and the Jews punched above their weight, 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.

My friends, when you have to confront identities or experiences that don’t fit your view of the world, you fall back on preconceived notions that are no more real than the whiteness I’ve described.

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. That version of American history is a sprawling, bewildering chronicle, relentlessly revised. It ignores or downplays a variety of peoples, cultures, religions, and regions, all to show that history is as objective and as curious and as expansive as the white imagination allows.

My dear friends, please try to understand that whiteness is limitless possibility. It is universal and invisible. That’s why many of you are offended by any reference to race. You believe you are acting and thinking neutrally, objectively, without preference for one group or the next, including your own. You see yourselves as colorless until black folk dump the garbage of race on your heads. At your best moments you may concede that you started the race game, but you swear to the God you love that it is we black folk who keep it going. You have no idea how absurd that notion is, and yet we have grown accustomed to your defiance of common sense.

The King and Simpson verdicts left America emotionally raw and at a brutal racial impasse. White folk got a rare chance to experience the sense of absurdity that black folk routinely feel when a clear case of injustice doesn’t get resolved in court. Many of you were outraged and shocked that Simpson could get away with murder. A lot of you were miffed, even heartbroken, that black folk cheered Simpson’s acquittal like it was Christmas in October. But you must see that the bitter taste left in your mouths was but a small taste of what black folk have swallowed from our first moments in this nation.

I didn’t take any surveys, but I believed that most black folk knew deep in our hearts that O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole and Ron. There’s more evidence against O.J. than there is for the existence of God. It’s not that Marcia Clark and her team didn’t do their due diligence. O.J.’s accusers and prosecutors lost before they stepped into the court. The hurts and traumas against black folk had piled so high, the pain had resonated so deeply, and the refusal of whiteness to open its eyes had become so abhorrent that black folk sent a message to white America. No amount of evidence against Simpson could possibly match the far greater evidence of racial injustice against black folk. And you can’t claim ignorance here, my friends. If a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn’t convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.

And let’s be real: O.J.’s betrayal hurt worse than Obama’s ascent. O.J. shared your worldview. O.J. took full advantage of the privilege you offered him as an honorary white man. He accepted the bargain in a way Obama never did, never could. Your anger for O.J. is that he was, finally—like you fear all black folk could potentially be—an ungrateful nigger. O.J. seemed to fully revel in whiteness and gladly deny that he was black, that is, until he got in trouble. Then that racial reflex kicked in: back against the wall, black against the wall.

Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history. You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible. History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. 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 th...

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. The idea that whiteness should be abolished, an idea that some white antiracist thinkers have put forth, disturbs a lot of you—especially when you argue that whiteness is not all murder and mayhem. Historian David Roediger has questioned if there is a “white culture outside of domination.” At the University of Minnesota, where he taught for five years, conservative white kids on campus said there was a need for a white cultural center if a black cultural center existed. When he asked his class what they’d put in a white cultural center, he said “there was the longest silence that I have ever experienced in a classroom.” The silence “was broken by a hand going up, and a shout: ‘Elvis!’ And then laughter, that Elvis would somehow be considered unambiguously white.” Of course there was laughter. If ever there’s been what Norman Mailer termed a white Negro, at least in style, and one who’s made money and his reputation off a derivative blackness, it’s Elvis Presley. If Elvis belongs in a white cultural center, then so do Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

The first stage of white racial grief is to plead utter ignorance about black life and culture.

The second stage of grief flashes in the assertion “it didn’t happen.” Instead of “forget it,” there is “deny it.” Civil rights icon Joseph Lowery often says that we live in the fifty-first state, the state of denial. Denial is even more sinister than amnesia because there is some concession to facts that are then roundly negated. Here is where the gaslight effect goes wild. Black folk are made to feel crazy for believing something they know to be true.

Beloved, you must admit that denial of fact, indeed denial as fact, has shaped your version of American history. This is how you can ingeniously deny your role in past racism. You acknowledge that bigotry exists. For instance, you will often say that separate but equal public policy was bad. You just don’t find too many current examples of the persistence of racism, like the fact that, given they have the same years of education, a white man with a criminal record is often more likely to get a job than a black man with no record. Or that even when they commit the same crime, black folk are more likely to do more time than a comparable white person. Or that a black male born in 2001 has a 32 percent chance of going to jail—a one-in-three shot—whereas a Latino has a 17 percent chance, and a white male a 6 percent chance. Or that black women are far more likely than others to be evicted. Or that police stop black and brown folk far more than white folk. Or that black folk are frequently illegally excluded from jury service. Sure, there are no white and black water fountains, but inequality persists.

White denial thrives on shifts and pivots. “It was my ancestors, not me, who did this to you.” But what looks like confession is really denial. The “them, not me” defense denies how the problem persists in the present day. 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. The institutions of national life favor your success, whether that means you get better schools and more jobs, or less punishment and less jail. Not because you’re necessarily smarter, or better behaved, but because being white offers you benefits, understanding, and forgiveness where needed. A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you active...

The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

There is more, beloved. If black folk hurt because of race, you say you hurt because of class. Many of you can’t see that race makes class hurt more. And when many of you claim that black folk shouldn’t get affirmative action, that the kids of, say, Barack Obama, or some rich black person, shouldn’t get a bid for a job or a space in a classroom usually reserved for white folk, you miss a crucial fact: wealthy blacks didn’t get a pass from Jim Crow; well-to-do blacks don’t get an exemption from racism. Of course our status mostly protects us from the worst that you can do to most of us, but it doesn’t stop us as a class of folk from being denied opportunities that our smarts and our success should have guaranteed.

My friends, we cannot deny that white folk of conscience were of enormous help to the cause of black struggle. Black and white folk often formed dynamic partnerships to combat racial inequality. But too often white folk want to be treated with kid gloves, or treated like adolescents who can’t take the truth of grownup racial history. So we have to spoon-feed you that truth and put your white faces in our stories to make you see them, perhaps like them, or at least to consider them legitimate and worthy of your attention. Appealing to your ego to protect our backsides, that’s the bargain many of us are forced to make.

Beloved, it’s not just on the silver screen where you dilute and distort our history. In everyday life the refusal to engage black folk tells on you through your exaggerated sense of insult where none should exist. Many of you are “shocked, shocked!” that black folk have taken to reminding you that “Black Lives Matter.” Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged. That’s because you’re used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge. You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don’t. Black lives were excluded from the start. The reason “Black Lives Matter” needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn’t tell black stories. The founding documents of American society didn’t include black life. When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.

And many are mad because they say I am trying to warp young people’s minds. On that score they have a point. I seek to fix the warp that racial bigotry can bring; I want to challenge, one brain and body at a time, the poisonous precincts in which some of my white students were bred. I want my students to be uncomfortable with their racial ignorance, with their sworn, or unconscious, innocence. I’m sure that feels warped to many whites.

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.

As my brave white student discovered, whiteness claims so loudly its innocence because it is guilty, or at least a lot of white folk feel that way. This is why, of course, your resistance to feelings of guilt is absurdly intense. There is a terror in accepting accountability, because it doesn’t end with your recognition that something is rotten in Denver or Detroit. It suggests something is amiss across our country. That’s a terrifying thought to field, a terrifying responsibility to absorb. It means accepting accountability for your unanimous, collective capacity for terror, for enjoying a way of life that comes at the direct expense of other folk who are denied the privileges you take for granted.

Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. 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. My students are a bit of a captive audience. They’re more willing to wrestle their whiteness to a standstill—or at least a tie between the historical pressure to forget and the present demand to remember. Believe it or not, that tiny concession, that small gesture, is progress.

There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight. You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective. By overdramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity. By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence. By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.

“You’ve been very tough on me,” the future president said. “But I love you.” There’s no question that Donald Trump has “huge” charisma. He possesses a brutally appealing magnetism that, tragically, amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time. That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.

One cannot ultimately be exempt from the treatment of one’s brothers and sisters. They are you, and you are them.

The status quo always favors neutrality, which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change.

Black Millennials have little use for respectability politics; they see no need to prove their humanity before you treat them with decency. They discern the fatal lapse in your logic: Why should black folk ever have to prove our humanity to white folk who enslaved and raped us, castrated and murdered us for kicks?

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. But we are not fooled. You do not bring this up because you’re genuinely concerned. 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. So you hurl that accusation at us like religion. But there is no righteousness in your retort, no healing in your hubris. We are dying, it is a serious matter, and you must lay down your smug self-satisfaction that we are our own worst enemies and face how you are killing us. Just this once set aside your litany of accusations and listen. Just this once take the side of the true victims of oppression. Just this once please don’t side with the manufacturers and perpetrators of our death. I’ll be honest and admit that there are ways that black folk are doing ourselves in. But I hope you can admit that even those ways are often linked to our gutless embrace of the bigotries you spew.

Do you think we like being killed by folk who look like us? Do you think it doesn’t bother us? Our bullets are often aimed at each other because we’re too near the site of pain and heartbreak, frustration and depression. We often lack food and shelter, and we live in homes overrun with bodies, leaving us little room or rest. So we lash out at them, or at an acquaintance, or a partner in crime. Yes, it is true: sometimes we send them, or, perhaps, a stranger nearby, to their eternal reward. This is the geography of despair. It is also the pain of never having control, of always being afraid, of struggling to care for and love what we cannot protect.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to ambush me with that “it’s-the-blacks-not-the-cops” claim on Meet the Press. It was right before the decision was made not to bring charges against white cop Darren Wilson, who had killed unarmed black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks,” Giuliani said. “We’re talking about the exception here.” The notion that we are indifferent to murders by other blacks is nonsense. But we also know that if Jamal or Willie kills somebody, and they’re caught, they’re going to jail. Cops are rarely held accountable for their slaughter of black people. Neither Jamal nor Willie pledged to protect and serve the community. Neither of them has been issued a badge and a gun to represent the state. The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.

Beloved, what you see happening among us is not best understood as black-on-black crime. Rather it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If our neighbors were white, they’d be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It’s not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too. Where’s the white-on-white crime rhetoric? Where are the rants against white folk ruining white culture with their murderous ways?

One truth should be clear: If you want interracial killing you have to have interracial communities. Wasn’t that one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams? To live in a nation where black and white folk could be victims of crime in integrated neighborhoods? Didn’t he argue that thieves should pay more attention to the content of our Cadillacs than their color? Perhaps I am misremembering? White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation. And, beloved, it might surprise you that white folk commit the most violent crimes too. 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.

Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life. These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction. The 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro family—a report by Harvard professor and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that a castrating black matriarchy and a “tangle of pathology” threatened the black family—is a famous example. Beloved, you don’t stop there. You feel compelled to make crime merely a matter of ethical collapse. You don’t mention the systemic removal of goods and services that drive some folk to crime. Nor do you talk much of black folk lacking the social supports that other ethnic groups enjoy. There is hardly any mention of the failure of the markets that are supposedly neutral, but which, in fact, favor those who aren’t black or poor.

Beloved, let’s try a brief thought experiment. Let’s apply the logic of some of your arguments about black folk to you. Take your argument that we should pay more attention to black-on-black crime than white cops killing black folk because more blacks are killed by other blacks. Now let’s compare the number of white Americans killed by whites to the number of Americans killed by terrorist acts. I can already feel your hair standing on end. You see how hurtful it is to make such a comparison? You see how it could miss the point of giving each cause of suffering its due? According to your logic, we should not be concerned with political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm. By Giuliani’s logic, then, the obsession with terror is both misplaced and hypocritical. We should focus instead on the plague of firearms on the American population. Far more white folk kill each other than are killed by terrorists. So let’s stop worrying about terrorism and worry about white-on-white homicide. Stop griping about a couple of planes crashing into a couple of towers. Stop crying over a few folk getting butchered by a few religious fanatics when the routine crime that snuffs white life lies in a white man’s assault rifle.

Beloved, you’ve got to face the fact that accusing black folk of perpetuating the legacy of inequality by using nigga is a vicious ruse. It is yet another way of refusing to accept responsibility, of wanting everyone else but white folk to practice the accountability you preach. All of this is a calculation to avoid a bigger issue, and that is how black folk are, after all of our efforts to be accepted as fully American, still seen as the other.

My friends, many of you have no idea of this level of anguish. You think that if we merely obey the cop’s commands he or she won’t feel threatened by us, won’t view us as the roadblock to their return home that night. You think that if we keep ourselves in check nothing bad will happen. Where have you been? Have you not seen the videos? These videos make it possible to see what has always been the case. Now there is proof of our suffering. Have you not seen how no matter what we do the cops come for us? That no matter how pleasant our speech, how lowly our spirits, how tame our bodies, how domesticated our gestures, we are read as a menace and threat by so many cops? “I feared for my life,” many cops who have shot unarmed black folk have said. Not a gun in sight. No attack in the offing. And yet we are consistently, without conscience, cut down in the streets.

Can you honestly say that if we just comply with the cops’ wishes that we’ll be safe? How many more black folk do you have to see get sent to their deaths by cops while doing exactly what they were told before you’ll believe us? You’ve seen the video of the young black man in South Carolina who goes to retrieve his wallet just as the Highway Patrol trooper instructs, and yet is still filled with lead for no other reason than he is who he is—a black male, a ferocious subversion of all that is decent and humane and worthy of space on earth. How can we conclude anything different? How can you? If you’re honest you’ll see that the police force is a metaphysical collective with a gift for racial punishment that has never viewed black folk as human beings, because the law that they are charged to enforce has never seen us as human beings. And the Constitution that the law rests on did not write us in as fully human.

Beloved, you must understand that for us terror pulses in the body of the cop. The police come loaded with far bigger weapons than they carry on their hips. The heat they pack is drawn from history. It’s all there next to their badges and guns and their Tasers and mace. Spreading state-sanctioned violence. Menacing black communities. Seeing blackness as criminal. Punishing back talk. Killing blacks who run.

My friends, please don’t pretend you can’t understand how we feel this way. And if you claim that slavery and Jim Crow and the sixties are ancient history, you know your words are lies before they leave your lips. How could that history be erased so quickly? How can all of that be got rid of overnight? How can it be washed, without great effort, from the mind of a white cop who confronts black folk? How can we deny the structures, systems, and social forces that shape how black folk are seen and treated?