Michael Eric Dyson
Author
1958-10-23
Books by Michael Eric Dyson
-
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
View on Amazon -
-
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Quotes by Michael Eric Dyson
-
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
Read quote -
Jackson's plight raises difficult questions about leadership and morality. His situation illustrates the need to acknowledge that our leaders will occasionally disappoint themselves and us. If we demand that they be perfect, we risk disillusionment when their shortcomings surface. The underlying flaw of our unwritten compact with leaders is the desperate need to believe that they must be pure to be effective. The best leaders concede their flawed humanity even as they aspire to lofty goals.This does not mean that we should not hold leaders accountable for their actions. To his credit, Jackson acknowledged his failure, sought the forgiveness of his family and followers, and provided for his infant daughter. He is willing to practice the same moral accountability he preaches. Because Jackson has so prominently urged young people to take the high road of personal responsibility, some conclude that his actions reveal hypocrisy. But it is not hypocritical to fail to achieve the moral standards that one believes are correct. Hypocrisy comes when leaders conjure moral standards that they refuse to apply to themselves and when they do not accept the same consequences they imagine for others who offend moral standards.
Read quote -
The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Read quote -
Jackson's plight raises difficult questions about leadership and morality. His situation illustrates the need to acknowledge that our leaders will occasionally disappoint themselves and us. If we demand that they be perfect, we risk disillusionment when their shortcomings surface. The underlying flaw of our unwritten compact with leaders is the desperate need to believe that they must be pure to be effective. The best leaders concede their flawed humanity even as they aspire to lofty goals.This does not mean that we should not hold leaders accountable for their actions. To his credit, Jackson acknowledged his failure, sought the forgiveness of his family and followers, and provided for his infant daughter. He is willing to practice the same moral accountability he preaches. Because Jackson has so prominently urged young people to take the high road of personal responsibility, some conclude that his actions reveal hypocrisy. But it is not hypocritical to fail to achieve the moral standards that one believes are correct. Hypocrisy comes when leaders conjure moral standards that they refuse to apply to themselves and when they do not accept the same consequences they imagine for others who offend moral standards.
Read quote -
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
Read quote -
The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Read quote -
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Read quote -
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
Read quote -
Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius.
Read quote -
Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.
Read quote -
White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.
Read quote -
When you see the misogyny of hip-hop, it's so horrible, it's so putrid, it's so, you know, odious, that we know, we smell, we see it. The misogyny that is reified, that is reinforced, that is subtly reproduced in corporate America or in church life or in synagogues and temples and the like, is sometimes more subtly dealt with.
Read quote -
Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.
Read quote -
Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.
Read quote -
I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote