What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Recently, as bigotry resurfaces, symbolized in the events in Charlottesville in August 2017, the lie is put to the belief that “this is not American, this is not us,” when, indeed, it truly is. We do not want to acknowledge how true it is because it makes us look complicit in prejudice we thought we had gotten over. Donald Trump is far more representative of the nation than many whites would like to admit.

This right here :)

It is unbearable to white America for Donald Trump to treat “them” like “they” treated “us.”

troubling strategy is the insistence by Chief of Staff John Kelly that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” Kelly said that the Civil War was fought between “men and women of good faith on both sides,” including the “honorable” Robert E. Lee.

a dastardly way, and they hate it. And I understand their hating it. But they are wrong.”11 If only his admirers could be half as honest.

“I think one of the most significant developments in the fight for civil rights in this country was the creation and invention of the smartphone. Because for the first time white people could actually see and witness for themselves what was going on.”

I think the media for king, the recording of Rodney Hood are good examples of white people being able to injustice for themselves before the 21st century.

Thomas Jefferson doubted the ability of the Negro to pursue refined knowledge.

This is not the first time West has peppered prominent black thinkers and politicians with ad hominem assaults dressed up as ideological difference. He also accused Melissa Harris-Perry of being the darling of the liberal elite. He claimed that Al Sharpton served time as a boss on Obama’s plantation. He accused Jesse Jackson of being addicted to television cameras. And he’s accused me of being a sellout, prostitute, and bootlicker who’s turned his back on the poor. What is behind West’s animus? And how does it reflect the fierce and ugly tensions that rose in black America when the first black president took office? Amidst the enormous pride and psychological satisfaction many black folk felt in Obama’s rise, it was exceedingly difficult to engage him with anything like the critical analysis warranted by his historic presidency.

Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

As a freelancing, itinerant, nonordained, self-anointed prophet, West has only to answer to himself.

Thus he avoids the negative consequences of ordination while remaining spiritually anchored. That’s fine if you’re a run-of-the-mill Christian, but there is, and should be, a higher standard for prophets.

at the 2010 National Urban League convention, Obama barked at West, “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?” Other foul words were uttered, West added, and Obama “cussed me out.”

The odd thing is that Obama talked right—chiding personal irresponsibility in a way that presumed the pathology of many black families and neighborhoods—but veered left in his public policy. West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right.