Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

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.