Michael Eric Dyson Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“I want young people to look at me and go, 'Damn, I want to be like that brother. He sharp, he be on point. He represent black people.' I want to make the life of the mind sexy.”

“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.”

“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 Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music. Remember, he was a chocolate, cherubic-faced genius with an African American halo. He had an Afro halo. He was a kid who was capable of embodying all of the high possibilities and the deep griefs that besieged the African American psyche.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”