Alright, folks! I have never really done a book review, and so I’m not confident that I will do a good job doing this book justice. But it is a book, I feel all white folks should read, even more all white Americans. So, I’ll do my best to sum up some high points, and convince you to pick up a copy today! Because you really need to read this book.
Tears We Cannot Stop was written by Michael Eric Dyson, a pastor, and sociology professor (currently teaching at Georgetown University). His book just came out, and is written as a sermon to white America.
And a sermon it is! Each chapter is a prayer, a plea, a cry for listening ears, a heartfelt effort to make us see what we refuse or cannot see. The book is moving, powerful, personal, yet based in facts. But most importantly it’s based in reality – the reality each black American faces, and keeps facing in America, a reality we choose to protect ourselves from. Dr. Dyson will take you through all your white thoughts and arguments and feelings that try to explain why maybe black folk are responsible for their own current fate in America, and will dismantle it, showing you what we are doing to our black brothers and sisters by clinging to history, innocence, moral exaggerations and distraction from the issues. He will be direct, and honest, and yet you can feel the desire and belief that we can maybe overcome this great divide of oppression we are placing on black Americans.
If you have thought that you’ve understood racism in the US, you need to read this book.
If you care about racial justice, you need to read this book.
If you don’t understand what all the fuss is about racism in America, because that was so yesterday, you definitely need to read this book.
If you care about racism, but feel like people use racism as an excuse these days, you need to read this book.
Basically, if you’re anything but a black American, I really think you need to read this book.
I’ve returned my library copy already, and don’t have my own copy yet, but let me share just a few powerful quotes from the book!
On how white supremacy developed in the US:
But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness.
On the historic roots of the US that were steeped in racism:
If whites are history, and history is white, then so are culture, and society, and law, and government, and politics; so are logic and thinking and reflection and truth and circumstances and the world and reality and morality and all that means anything at all. Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history. You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness.
On justice:
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
On the burden white insistence on innocence places on black/white relationships:
And even when individual black people confront individual white people, even when we love one another, white innocence still clouds our relationships. We are two historical forces meeting and the velocity of that history is so strong that it can break the bonds of individual love. We are no longer two people asking each other to be understood. Instead we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.
This happens to so many of us, so many of you. A white person we love is no longer an individual, but, in their insistence on innocence, they are all of whiteness; they have chosen whiteness over us.
On white guilt:
There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight. You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective. By overdramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity. By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence. By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.
The real question that must be asked of white innocence is whether or not it will give up the power of life and death over black lives. Whether or not it will give up the power to kill in exchange for brotherhood and sisterhood. If it does, it can at long last claim its American siblings and we can become a true family.
On feelings about the police:
Beloved, the way we feel about cops is how many of you feel in the face of terror. And yet, long before 9/11, long before Al-Queda, long before ISIS, we felt that too, at your hands, at the hands of your ancestors, at the hands of your kin who are our cops.
(Do you ever thank your lucky stars that black folks have not done to you what terrorist who despise this country have done? These terrorists claim their actions are driven by hate for our nation. Does it ever give you pause and make you say, ” Thank God that black folk never – well, almost never – poisoned our food, when we made them cook for us. They never killed our children, when we made them watch over them. They rarely conspired to murder us in our sleep when we forced them to share intimate space with us. They never rose up in unison, because we raped their women, murdered their children, and castrated their men.” Does that ever cross your minds?)
On black feelings about white America:
We do not hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us. That is our gift to you. We cannot halt you: that is our curse.
