Top 30 Michael Eric Dyson Quotes

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

I’m a ‘tweener,’ man! I couldn’t march with Dr. King and them. And I’m too old to be a hip-hopper. But I’ve been granted honorary status in each generation… I see my tongue as a bridge over which ideas can travel back and forth.

Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal and bloody fields of political mission.

By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop’s critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.

I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.

Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he’s also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes.

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don’t necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of black identity and the possibilities of R&B music in the ’70s and ’80s, will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we’ve ever produced in our tradition.

In the minds of many Americans, if you are a radical Democrat or a Socialist, you are automatically a Communist. And if you are a Communist, then therefore you are an anti-American person and a person who is not a patriot. But nothing is further from the truth.

I don’t think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.

My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mortality says to us that here’s a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.

I used to tell people when I preached at a church, ‘If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.’

In the barbershop, there’s democracy. You’re a professor; you’re an engineer; you’re a garbage man, have at it. You got something to say, get down with it.

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

There’s a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.

There is no conscious choice of heterosexual identity any more than there is a homosexual one. The last person in the world who wants to be homosexual, for the most part, are homosexuals.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it’s global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don’t have a balanced conversation.

In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won’t create better jobs with more pay.

My ambition didn’t grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, ‘hits.’ What’s commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can’t break in.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines.

I knew Snoop Dog didn’t start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn’t start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn’t start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.

Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers.

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.

With the evolution of social media that includes blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, who and how information is delivered has changed tremendously. The landscape for news is a different place, and people have to accept that.