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

Michael Eric Dyson

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" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House. "

Michael Eric Dyson

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

Michael Eric Dyson

" I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" If you take a guy like a Barack Obama, who's raised millions of dollars from the most donors in the history of this nation, it suggests that there's a deep and profound hunger for a new politics to come forth. And a guy like him has been able to mobilize that and to reach certain parts of the hip-hop generation. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

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

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" I don't worship the Bible, I worship the God who gave the Bible. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" 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. "

Michael Eric Dyson

" Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever. "

Michael Eric Dyson