Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

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

you so greatly because they insisted on separating whiteness from American identity. The two are neither synonymous nor exhaustive; they neither signify all that America means, nor can they possibly radiate the full brightness of her promise.

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

Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values.

which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change.

It signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty.

From the start he was not there to protect or serve us, but to protect and serve you, which often meant getting rid of us.

In the end it only makes the slaughter of our people worse to know that your disapproval of those white folk has spared your reputations but not our lives.

We hate that cops don’t treat us the way they treat you.

How it is at once capable of exulting in privilege while proclaiming it is the least privileged of identities.

Beloved, Donald Trump is what we are left with when whiteness drains the body politic of crucial self-awareness and we stiffen into a moral corpse.

if it increases, rather than decreases, the force, energy, and structure of racial antagonism, then it is racist, no matter the intent or conscious aim of its perpetrator.