Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

We must face up to what we as a country have made of the black people who have been the linchpin of democracy, the folk who saved America from itself, who redeemed it from the hypocrisy of proclaiming liberty and justice for all while denying all that liberty and justice should be to us.

He concluded, sadly, that most whites are unconscious racists.

“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.”

So I want to tell you right off the bat that 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. They’re intellectual rubbish, cultural garbage. The quicker you accept that, the better off you’ll be, and so will the rest of us.

Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.

Of course the paradox is that even though whiteness is not real it is still true. I mean true as a force to be reckoned with. It is true because it has the power to make us believe it is real and to punish those who doubt its magic. Whiteness is slick and endlessly inventive. It is most effective when it makes itself invisible, when it appears neutral, human, American.

not asking you to let go of your humanity, but, in the best way possible, to find your way back to it.

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.

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.

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

Too bad that so many white folk believe that pretending not to see race is the way to address racism, and that when they get caught seeing race for their advantage—as in using the natural hairstyles of black folk—they claim not to see race to their advantage. Jacobs overlooks the point that black

In the narrative of American history, especially the kind told in our nation’s textbooks, the movement didn’t seek racial justice as much as it sought a race-neutral society.

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

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, except, of course, when you’re called on it.

You never stop to think how the history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. You never stop to think that Babe Ruth never had to play the greatest players of his generation—just the greatest white players. You never stop to think that most of our presidents never rose to the top because they bested the competition—just the white competition. White privilege is a self-selecting tool that keeps you from having to compete with the best.

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.

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.

Beloved, you must give up myths about yourself, about your history. That you are resolutely individual, and not part of a group. That you pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps.

But we must risk your wrath to speak back to a defiantly innocent whiteness. You often deem black dissent as disloyalty to America. But that black dissent may yet redeem a white innocence that threatens the nation’s moral and patriotic health.

let off steam from a simmering rage at how white folk could afford not to know what many of them couldn’t help but know. I’d seen enough in life to know that remorse has its place in our moral ecology.

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

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.

“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.”

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.

Black folk have, throughout history, displayed their patriotism by criticizing the nation for its shortcomings.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue.

Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected.

The two are yoked: criticizing police brutality is said to be hating law enforcement. Sitting during the national anthem is said to be hating America. This sophomoric approach will remain a roadblock to genuine racial engagement until it is replaced by a deeper, more humane, more sophisticated understanding of the issue of race.

In its place should rise a curiosity, but even more, a genuine desire to know and understand just what it means to be black in America.

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.

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 are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.”

But there is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities. Take blackness out of the equation and you’d have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities.

The ventriloquist effect of whiteness has worked brilliantly; black mouths moving, white ideas flowing. What your vast incuriosity about black life keeps you from knowing, and this is heartbreaking to admit, is that we black folk often see ourselves the same way you see us. Sometimes we view our own culture, our traits and habits, through the distorted lens of white condescension or hatred. Often we make other vulnerable black folk in our midst the nigger you’ve made us all out to be.