Long Time Coming Quotes

“Black bodies have been killed and progress has been stalled to provide white comfort.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“Schools often use Black students in this way in order to achieve racial reckoning on the cheap. They avoid bringing in teachers—or, in other settings, corporations avoid bringing in experts—to address gaps, holes, and areas of ignorance. And the burden for teaching falls on the few Black or Brown folk in the room or office, instead of being assumed by the white folk in those arenas in need of the reflection and change. It is all so utterly exhausting.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“If justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public, then patience is what mercy sounds like out loud, and forgiveness is the accent with which grace speaks.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“...one need not be religious at all to believe that we should be willing to give what we seek: charitable interpretations of behavior and a willingness to offer just appraisals of conduct with an eye toward fairness.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“Revolution at its roots, the radical at its best, is usually the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of agitation that combusts in a fateful moment. And then as soon as such a movement or revolution achieves its ends, members of the revolution set out to rebuild society, establish culture, set rules, and create a culture that preserves the change it has wrought against rival claims. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't internal dialogue, strong disagreements from within, and people calling each other traitors. That sort of hyperbole has often resulted in the attempt to deny legitimacy to the 'other'....”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“...in a true democracy, things are often messy, ...you often don't get what you want or deserve immediately, and... you have to constantly engage, protest, resist, and negotiate.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“The revolutionary cries of Black Lives Matter rest upon a simple yet poignant foundation: that Black lives, which haven't mattered, should matter, and that we must reform the criminal justice system, greatly change if not abolish the police, and grapple with systemic racism.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“...we must reckon with the plague of police brutality and how it has ravaged Black communities for three centuries. The cops remain in large part violent enforcers of white supremacy.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“It is more difficult to reckon with race if we cannot”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“A disturbing habit has arisen: ordinary white women, neither empowered by the courts nor sanctioned by social services, demand that Black folk give account of their actions, their presence, or their intentions. Such demands (often captured on a video recording) are made to kids selling lemonade on the street, folk barbecuing in the local park, or a student stealing a few moments of shut-eye in an Ivy League university”
― Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America