Tears
We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
Michael
Eric Dyson (St. Martin's Press, 2017)
Michael
Eric Dyson is a worthy prophet for these racially troubled times. He
is a sociology professor who's also a Baptist minister, with a
background in philosophy; in this book, he is speaking as a preacher,
appealing powerfully to our moral sense. Tears We Cannot Stop
is structured as a worship service, with a sermon at its heart. It's
both up-to-the-minute, from the era of Donald Trump and Black Lives
Matter, and steeped in America's history.
By
way of invocation, Dyson describes his young daughter coming face to
face with racism, and his son fearing for his life in a traffic stop.
By way of scripture, he quotes Martin Luther King, noting that King
had different messages for his black and white audiences. "That
didn't make King a Janus-faced liar. He was, instead, a man of noble
forbearance. He understood what white folk could hear; he knew what
you dared not listen to. He knew what you could bear to know."
Dr.
Dyson is, as Dr. King was, called to press the limits of what white
people could stand to hear. His sermon is a jeremiad, a lamentation
meant to penetrate our ignorance, and our willful blindness. His
urgency is as intimate as it is urgent: "Beloved, let me start
by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white
people. And yet so many of them, so many of you, exist." His
point is that whiteness exists in a social realm, as a political
force. "It is most effective when it makes itself invisible,
when it appears neutral, human, American."
Because
what does that make the black man? Alien, non-human, un-American; and
it has had this effect from the U.S. Constitution making a slave
three-fifths of a man, to right-wing websites making Barack Obama a
Kenyan Muslim. Most of us would strongly prefer to imagine that this
has nothing to do with us; but racial covenants in real estate
extended, in law, into my lifetime, and in practice, into the present
day.
My
local realtor's "Blue Lives Matter" window sign might just
as well say "Whites Only", though I daresay they would deny
it. And of course, no one has ever argued that the lives of police
officers don't matter; no cases of violence against them go
unreported. What Black Lives Matter is arguing is that, until the
justice system starts treating black people fairly, 'All Lives
Matter' will remain a lie.
The
traditional defensive retort to that is what-about-ism, 'isn't black
on black crime the real problem?' Dyson sees that coming a mile away.
"Beloved, why is it that every time black folk talk about how
poorly the cops treat us you say that we should focus instead on how
we slaughter each other in the streets every day? Isn't that like
asking the person who tells you that they're suffering from cancer to
focus instead on their diabetes? Your racial bedside manner has
always been fairly atrocious."
Dyson
is well aware that his sermon is spoken to a congregation variously
ready to hear it. But at this moment when outright white supremacy is
being countenanced in public, we need to stay in touch with the
facts on the ground, and this book has them. We also need to admit
the ways the status quo benefits us, without being flattened by
embarrassment, shame, helplessness, or the frustration and anger that
those feelings often spark. As the Bible says so often, 'Listen up!'
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