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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America Hardcover – January 17, 2017
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NOW A NEW YORK TIMES, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, INDIEBOUND, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, CHRONICLE HERALD, SALISBURY POST, GUELPH MERCURY TRIBUNE, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER | NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: The Washington Post • Bustle • Men's Journal • The Chicago Reader • StarTribune • Blavity • The Guardian • NBC New York's Bill's Books • Kirkus • Essence
“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race ... a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and King's Why We Can't Wait." ―The New York Times Book Review
Toni Morrison hails Tears We Cannot Stop as "Elegantly written and powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish."
Stephen King says: "Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid…If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know―what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen."
Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.
As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.
"The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future."
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSt. Martin's Press
- Publication dateJanuary 17, 2017
- Dimensions5.42 x 0.95 x 7.78 inches
- ISBN-101250135990
- ISBN-13978-1250135995
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From the Publisher
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
Beloved, the deed has been done. We have—since that 'we' must contain, by virtue of our system of government, if not the will, then at least the implied consent, of even the people who opposed with all their souls the choice you made—elected Donald J. Trump as president of the United States of America. Please take measure of every phrase in that sentence.
Whether he wishes to be or not, Donald Trump is the epitome, not only of white innocence and white privilege, but of white power, white rage, and yes, even of white supremacy.
The greatly stepped-up harassment of people of color, and Muslims, and immigrants in the wake of Trump’s election points to the sea change in our naked tolerance for such assaults, in the permission granted to diabolical forces that rob us even more of comity and support of the commonweal.
Donald Trump harms our nation’s positive racial future.
Yet, beloved, there remains, after all, the blackness that is prophecy, the blackness that is inexplicable hope in the face of savage hopelessness.
Beloved, if the enslaved could nurture, on the vine of their desperate deficiency of democracy, the spiritual and moral fruit that fed our civilization, then surely we can name and resist demagoguery; we can protest, and somehow defeat, the forces that threaten the soul of our nation. To not try, to give up on the possibility that we can make a difference, can make the difference, is to give up on our past, on our complicated, difficult, but victorious past. Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.
—Michael Eric Dyson.
December 2016.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Anguish and hurt throb in every word of Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop...It is eloquent, righteous, and inspired...Often lyrical, Tears is not...without indignation...brilliance and rectitude." ―The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Dyson...creates a sermon unlike any we've heard or read, and it's right on time...an unapologetically bold plea for America to own up to its inexplicable identity anxiety." ―Essence
"[Dyson's] narrative voice carries a deeper and more intimate authority, as it grows from his own experience as a black man in America ― from being beaten by his father to being profiled by the police to dealing with his brother's long-term incarceration...Dyson's raw honesty and self-revelation enables him to confront his white audience and reach out to them." ―The Chicago Tribune
"Be ready to pause nearly every other sentence, absorb what is said, and prepare for action. Tears We Cannot Stop is meant to change your thinking." ―The Miami Times
"[Tears We Cannot Stop] talks directly to you, about issues deep, disturbing, and urgently in need of being faced." ―Philly.com
“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race ... a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and King's Why We Can't Wait. ―The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
"Impassioned." ―Library Journal
"Readers will find searing moments in Tears We Cannot Stop, when Dyson's words proves unforgettable...But more than education, Dyson wants a reckoning." ―The Washington Post
“Dyson lays bare our conscience, then offers redemption through our potential change.” ―Booklist
"If you read Michael Eric Dyson’s New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," then you know what a powerful work of cultural analysis his book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America is going to be. At a time when everyone needs to speak more openly, honestly, and critically about the racial divisions that have been allowed to grow in the United States, Dyson’s book ― available in January ― could not be a more welcome read." ―Bustle
"A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide... The readership Dyson addresses may not fully be convinced, but it can hardly remain unmoved." ―Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
"Elegantly written, Tears We Cannot Stop is powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish." ―Toni Morrison
"Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid. It shook me up, but in a good way. This is how it works if you’re black in America, this is what happens, and this is how it feels. If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know―what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen." ―Stephen King
"Michael Eric Dyson is alive to the fierce urgency of now and yet he's full of felicitous contradictions: an intellectual who won't talk down to anyone; a man of God who eschews piousness; a truth-teller who is not afraid of doubt or nuance; a fighter whose arguments, though always to the point, are never ad hominem. We can and should be thankful we have a writer like Michael Eric Dyson is our midst." ―Dave Eggers, from the preface of Can You Hear Me Now?
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Tears We Cannot Stop
A Sermon to White America
By Michael Eric DysonSt. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2017 Michael Eric DysonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-13599-5
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
I. Call to Worship,
II. Hymns of Praise,
III. Invocation,
IV. Scripture Reading,
V. Sermon,
Repenting of Whiteness,
1. Inventing Whiteness,
2. The Five Stages of White Grief,
3. The Plague of White Innocence,
Being Black in America,
4. Nigger,
5. Our Own Worst Enemy?,
6. Coptopia,
VI. Benediction,
VII. Offering Plate,
VIII. Prelude to Service,
IX. Closing Prayer,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
CALL TO WORSHIP
"Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it ... And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear."
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
America is in trouble, and a lot of that trouble — perhaps most of it — has to do with race. Everywhere we turn, there is discord and division, death and destruction. When we survey the land, we see a country full of suffering that we cannot fully understand, and a history that we can no longer deny. Slavery casts a long shadow across our lives. The spoils we reaped from forcing people to work without wages and treating them with grievous inhumanity continue to haunt us in a racial gulf that seems impossible to overcome. Black and white people don't merely have different experiences; we seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another. The merchants of racial despair easily peddle their wares in a marketplace riddled by white panic and fear. Black despair piles up with each body that gets snuffed on video and streamed on social media. We have, in the span of a few years, elected the nation's first black president and placed in the Oval Office the scariest racial demagogue in a generation. The two may not be unrelated. The remarkable progress we seemed to make with the former has brought out the peril of the latter.
What, then, can we do? We must return to the moral and spiritual foundations of our country and grapple with the consequences of our original sin. To do that we need not share the same religion, worship the same God, or, truly, even be believers at all. For better and worse, our national moral landscape has been shaped by the dynamics of a Christianity that has from the start been deeply intertwined with religious mythology and cultural symbolism. The Founding Fathers did not for the most part believe what evangelical Christians believe now. Most believers today certainly do not share Thomas Jefferson's view of the Bible. In his redacted version of the New Testament, Jefferson purged the miracles, Jesus' divinity, and the Resurrection. But all of us, from agreeable agnostics to fire-and-brimstone Protestants, from devout Catholics to observant Jews, from devoted Muslims to those who claim no god at all, share a language of moral repair. That language is our common meeting ground, our tool of analysis, and yes, our inspiration for repentance, our hope for redemption.
Although I am a scholar, a cultural and political critic, and a social activist, I am, before, and above anything else, an ordained Baptist minister. Please don't hold that against me, although I'll understand if you do. I know that religion has a bad rap. We believers deserve a lot of the criticism that we receive. Our actions and beliefs nearly warrant wholesale skepticism. (Can I let you in on a secret? I share a lot of that reaction, but that's another book.) But deep in my heart I believe that our moral and spiritual passions can lead to a better day for our nation. I know that when we get out of our own way and let the spirit of love and hope shine through we are a better people.
But such love and hope can only come about if we first confront the poisonous history that has almost unmade our nation and undone our social compact. We must face up to what we as a country have made of the black people who have been the linchpin of democracy, the folk who saved America from itself, who redeemed it from the hypocrisy of proclaiming liberty and justice for all while denying all that liberty and justice should be to us.
Yes, I said us. This is where I take leave of my analytical neutrality, or at least the appearance of it. This is where I cast my fate with the black people who birthed and loved me, who built a legacy of excellence and struggle and pride amidst one of the most vicious assaults on humanity in recorded history. That assault may have started with slavery, but it didn't end there. The legacy of that assault, its lingering and lethal effect, continues to this day. It flares in broken homes and blighted communities, in low wages and social chaos, in self-destruction and self-hate too. But so much of what ails us — black people, that is — is tied up with what ails you — white folk, that is. We are tied together in what Martin Luther King, Jr., called a single garment of destiny. Yet sewed into that garment are pockets of misery and suffering that seem to be filled with a disproportionate number of black people. (Of course, America is far from simply black and white by whatever definition you use, but the black-white divide has been the major artery through which the meaning of race has flowed throughout the body politic.)
Now just because I identify with my people doesn't mean that I don't understand and grapple with what it means to be white in America. In fact, I was trained in your schools and I now teach your children. But I remain what I was when I started my vocation, my pilgrimage of self-discovery: a black preacher. It is for that reason that I don't want to — really, I can't afford to — give up on the possibility that white America can definitively, finally, hear from one black American preacher a plea, a cry, a sermon, from my heart to yours.
If you're interested in my social analysis and my scholarly reflections on race, I've written plenty of other books for you to read. I tried to make this book one of them, but in the end, I couldn't. I kept coming up short. I kept deleting words from the screen, a lot of them, enough of them to drive me to despair that I'd ever finish. I was stopped cold. I was trying to make the message fit the form, when it was the form itself that was the problem.
What I need to say can only be said as a sermon. I have no shame in that confession, because confession, and repentance, and redemption play a huge role in how we can make it through the long night of despair to the bright day of hope. Sermons are tough, not only to deliver, but, just as often, to hear. Yet, in my experience, if we stick with the sermon — through its pitiless recall of our sin, its relentless indictment of our flaws — we can make it to the uplifting expressions and redeeming practices that make our faith flow from the pulpit to the public, from darkness to light.
There is a long tradition of a kind of sermon, or what some call the jeremiad, an extended lamentation about the woes we face, about the woes we embody, a mournful catalogue of complaint, the blues on page or stage. Henry David Thoreau was a friend to the form; so was Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead of blasting the nation from outside the parameters of its moral vision, the jeremiad, named after the biblical prophet Jeremiah, comes calling from within. It calls us to reclaim our more glorious features from the past. It calls us to relinquish our hold on — really, to set ourselves free from — the dissembling incarnations of our faith, our country, and democracy itself that thwart the vision that set us on our way. To repair the breach by announcing it first, and then saying what must be done to move forward.
I offer this sermon to you, my dear white friends, my beloved comrades of faith and country. My sermon to you is cast in the form of a church service. I adopt the voices of the worship and prayer leader, the choir director, the reader of scripture, the giver of testimony, the preacher of the homily, the bestower of benediction and the exhorter to service, and the collector of the offering plate. I do so in the interest of healing our nation through honest, often blunt, talk. It will make you squirm in your seat with discomfort before, hopefully, pointing a way to relief.
I do not do so from a standpoint of arrogance, of being above the fray, pointing the finger without an awareness of my own frailty, my own suffering and need for salvation. And yet I must nevertheless prophesy, not because I'm perfect, but because I'm called. God stood in my way when I tried to write anything, and everything, except what I offer you now.
This is written to you, my friends, because I feel led by the Spirit to preach to you. I don't mind if you call Spirit common sense, or desperate hope, or willful refusal to accept defeat. I don't mind if you conclude that religion is cant and faith is a lie. I simply want to bear witness to the truth I see and the reality I know. And without white America wrestling with these truths and confronting these realities, we may not survive. To paraphrase the Bible, to whom much is given, much is required. And you, my friends, have been given so much. And the Lord knows, what wasn't given, you simply took, and took, and took. But the time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future.
CHAPTER 2HYMNS OF PRAISE
What are these songs, and what do they mean? ... They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
My ten-year-old son Mike was visiting my wife and me in Hartford, Connecticut, during the summer of 1988. I was a teacher and assistant director of a poverty project at Hartford Seminary. One evening we all piled into the car to drive over to my office to pick up some papers. Mike was behaving so badly in the car that I pulled over to the side of the road and gave him three licks on his hands. I was a young parent who had grown up with licks of my own and hadn't yet learned the damage that corporal punishment wreaks. After I finished disciplining him I drove the single block to my building.
As I neared the seminary, two white cops drove up in their squad car. They signaled me to pull over before they got out of their vehicle. One of the cops approached my door, commanding me to get out of the car. His partner approached my wife's door.
"Can I ask you why you're stopping me, officer?" I asked politely and professionally. Like most black men I'd learned to be overly indulgent to keep the blue wrath from crashing on my head.
"Just get out of the car," he demanded.
As I opened the door, I told the cop that I was a professor at Hartford Seminary, pointing to the school behind me.
"Sure," he said drolly. "And I'm John Wayne."
Even before he instructed me, I knew to "assume the position," to place my hands against the car and lean forward. I'd done it so many times I could offer a class on correct procedure. I could hear the other cop quizzing my wife, asking her if everything was okay, if my son was fine. Mike was in the back seat crying, fearful of what might happen to me.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Mike tearfully insisted. "Why are you doing this to my dad?"
I heard snatches of the other cop's conversation with my wife. Obviously someone — a well-meaning white person no doubt — had seen me punishing Mike in the car and reported it as child abuse. I was ashamed that I had given licks to my son. I was embarrassed that my actions had brought the fury of the cops down on me, on us.
Just as my wife was telling the cop how preposterous this was, two more police cars pulled up with four more white cops.
Damn, I thought to myself, if I had been mugged, I bet I couldn't have gotten a cop to respond within half an hour. And now, within five minutes of disciplining my son, I've got six cops breathing down my neck ready to haul me into the station for child abuse. Or worse.
The other cops formed a circle around our car. The cop who pulled me from my car still refused to explain why he had stopped me. He forcefully patted me down as my wife and my son explained yet again that I had done nothing wrong and that Mike was fine.
"You sure everything's alright?" the cop asked my wife while looking my way for degrading emphasis. She angrily insisted that all was fine.
Finally the cop frisking me addressed me.
"We got a complaint that someone was hurting a child," he said.
"I can assure you that I love my son, and that I wasn't hurting him," I said in a measured voice. "I punished my child now so that he wouldn't one day end up being arrested by you," I couldn't help adding. And instantly I regretted my words, hoping my brief fit of snarkiness wouldn't set him off and get me hammered or shot.
"We have to check on these things," the second cop snapped back. "Just don't do anything wrong."
The cop frisking me proceeded to shove me against the car for good measure. Then the six cops got back into their cars and unsurprisingly offered no apology before driving off.
After I picked up my papers, I was still shaken up, and so was my family. Back in the car, I fast-forwarded the tape of N.W.A.'s debut album, Straight Outta Compton, to "Fuck tha Police," their blunt and poetic war cry against unwarranted police aggression and terror. I cranked up the volume, blasting the song out of my car window. The FBI harassed N.W.A.; local police were enraged by their lyrics. But many of us felt that this song about brutality and profiling finally captured our rage against police terror.
I thought "fuck" seemed the right word for cops who bring terror on black folk.
The historian Edward E. Baptist reminds us that "fuck" is from the Old English word that means to strike or beat, and before that, to plow and tear open. The cops have fucked the lives of black folk.
* * *
Beloved, as your choir director, I implore you to sing with me now. These hymns pronounce profane lyrical judgment on our unjust urban executioners. Some will be unfamiliar to you. But critical times call for critical hymns. These songs reflect our terror at the hands of the police in the strongest words possible. These are what our hymns sound like in America today. Therefore, as the old folk say, I will line out the hymn for you and give you the words of the tune as they are to be sung.
Our first hymnist is KRS-One, our generation's James Cleveland, the master composer of gospel songs. KRS-One wrote a wonderful song that captures our collective trauma. It is entitled "Sound of da Police."
Let me call out his words for you to repeat. "Yeah, officer from overseer you need a little clarity? / Check the similarity." Dear friends, in this song KRS-One argues that his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather had to deal with the cops. KRS-One asks the question, and I ask you to sing along with me, "When's it gonna stop?!"
We will also sing another of KRS-One's splendid songs. It is entitled "Who Protects Us from You?" KRS-One says of the police: "You were put here to protect us / But who protects us from you?"
Let us turn our hymnals to our next song, composed by the Fugees, fronted by the powerful Lauryn Hill, who eventually left the group to find even greater applause as a solo artist. Think of her as you think of our beloved Aretha Franklin, who was a member of the New Bethel Baptist Church choir in Detroit before she departed to achieve international stardom on her own. The Fugees wrote a powerful attack on police brutality entitled "The Beast." In it, Lauryn Hill raps that if she loses control because of the cops' psychological tricks then she will be sent to a penitentiary "such as Alcatraz, or shot up like El-Hajj Malik Shabazz ... And the fuzz treat bruh's like they manhood never was."
The next hymn was composed by the great Tupac Shakur. He was one of the most influential artists of our time. Shakur began his career composing odes to the Black Panthers. He went on to embrace more universal inspirations before meeting a violent death on the streets of Las Vegas. Shakur brings to mind Sam Cooke, the legendary gospel artist who shifted gears and became a soul and pop star before he was violently shot down in Los Angeles. Let us perform together the words of Tupac's poignant hymn, "Point The Finga." In this song Tupac says that he had been lynched by crooked cops who retained their jobs, and that his tax dollars were subsidizing his own oppression by paying them to "knock the blacks out."
* * *
I teach the work of these hymnists at Georgetown, so my students can hear their lessons and perhaps change their tunes of social justice. We have pored over Jay Z's lyrics. Of course they hear his exaltation of hustling. But more important, they hear in his "A Ballad For The Fallen Soldier" a deep and angry battle with the police terror that grips black life.
Off to boot camp, the world's facing terror
Bin Laden been happenin' in Manhattan
Crack was anthrax back then, back when
Police was Al-Qaeda to black men.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson. Copyright © 2017 Michael Eric Dyson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (January 17, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250135990
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250135995
- Item Weight : 11.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.42 x 0.95 x 7.78 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #359,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #329 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
- #836 in Discrimination & Racism
- #1,061 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Michael Eric Dyson is an award winning author, a widely celebrated Georgetown University professor, a prominent public intellectual and a noted political analyst. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he is also an ordained Baptist minister. Dyson is a two-time NAACP Image Award winner (Why I Love Black Women, and Is Bill Cosby Right?), and the winner of the American Book Award for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. His book The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America was a Kirkus Prize finalist. Dyson has written 19 books, and edited another one, over his nearly 25-year publishing career. He is also a highly sought after public speaker who is known to excite both secular and sacred audiences. Follow him on Twitter @michaeledyson and on his official Facebook page (facebook.com/michaelericdyson)
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Customers find the book thought-provoking and inspiring. They praise the author's honesty and truthfulness in expressing the current struggles. The story is described as heartbreaking, passionate, and moving. Readers describe the book as powerful and timely. However, some find the writing style challenging to read, especially for white readers.
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"This book is spot on in it's timing, the message and a clear, doable, call to action, I began before I finished the book...." Read more
"...The authors provides some great first steps if one is willing to see the evils of racism and America's attempt to deny the uglier parts of it's..." Read more
Customers have different views on the message. Some find it courageous and insightful, while others feel the message is preachy, repetitive, and churchy.
"...At times the message seems repetitious, but then maybe it needs to be for the reader to fully grasp the severity of it...." Read more
"...Dyson is honest, insightful, and courageous...." Read more
"Hmm just too churchy" Read more
"Wonderful, courageous diatribe imploring we white folk to finally do a fearless moral inventory of our nation's original sin...one that continues to..." Read more
Customers find the book difficult to read. They mention it's not a quick read, and it's hard for white audiences to understand the writing style. The book makes readers feel sad and horrible, making them want to walk away.
"...It is uncomfortable at times, challenging, and also encouraging...." Read more
"...This is a hard book to read, at least if you are white...." Read more
"Timely, provocative, brilliant, painful, and, ultimately, a very necessary step toward authentic national healing and transformation...." Read more
"...This book did not do that. It just made me sad and feel horrible and want to walk away to avoid the whole mess. I'm not doing that...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2017Timely, provocative, brilliant, painful, and, ultimately, a very necessary step toward authentic national healing and transformation. As a white, long-time fellow traveler, I am so grateful that Dr. Dyson has answered his calling to lead us toward redemptive justice with truth, decency and love--albeit, at times, necessary tough love. I am in my third read already and learning more and more each time.
Dyson's sermon serves as an exceptional read for believer and non-believer alike as it offers a framework and lexicon for us to engage with one another as we work our way through ongoing racially turbulent and polarized times. I am not a critic by trade so I will leave the professional analysis to the experts. I am a K-12 educator and seeker of social justice. I found this work both accessible and challenging in the best of ways. In my daily work, the evidence of the invention of whiteness, white innocence and white fragility and their pernicious impacts are ubiquitously abundant such that Dyson’s claims simply cannot be denied.
Dyson’s sermon is not always a comfortable read. That’s the point. It is a workout for the soul and psyche that results in the growing pains necessary for personal and collective liberation.
Thank you, Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, for opening your head and heart so broadly and deeply there is room enough for all of us in this racial healing process. The writing of this book is the ultimate act of truth and forgiveness. You have entrusted us with your most profound insights, personal experiences, and extend a vulnerability that humbles and arrests me. As you shared in a recent interview, "your trust in us grows out of forgiveness and the demand for truth for which is stands on, and the love it seeks to extend". Amen! I am in!
- Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2017This is a book that I challenge all my white friends to read, no matter where you stand on the spectrum of confronting white privilege and systemic racism. Michael Eric Dyson delivers a powerful, engaging, personal, informational, inspiring sermon that’s essential at this moment in time when racial division is especially high.
I urge you to read with an open heart and mind, to set aside your discomfort and listen to Dyson’s plea for white Americans to reckon with the harsh truths of racism.
Dyson is an ordained minister, so what better way to present this than as a sermon. He divides it into multiple sections: in “Hymns of Praise,” he cleverly shares hymns in the form of rap lyrics; in “Scripture Reading,” he quotes Martin Luther King Jr.; in the main sermon, he addresses whiteness specifically (including white innocence, white fragility, and white privilege) and then segues into a section about what it’s like to be black in America. Following that is “Benediction,” one of my favorite parts: in it he offers practical suggestions for what white people can do to make things better.
The whole thing is incredibly current and topical, with commentary on Black Lives Matter, the recent election and Donald Trump’s rise to power.
For white people who seek to understand more about racism and white privilege in America (and really, that should be all of us), this is the book to read. It was literally written for us.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2017It should come as little surprise that Dyson's book has in so many reviews become a magnet of scorn for fragile and easily-wounded whites who take great offense to everything from the titles of other works in Dyson's bibliography to the decision to address this book to white America as a collective to having the temerity to suggest that whiteness is anything but absolved of historical wrongdoing. The existence of this same sort of fragility -- one that breaks at the mere suggestion of white innocence being conducive to fostering racist ideology or at the acknowledgement of existing institutional structures that continue to harm black Americans with impunity -- is, after all, at the very heart of the work's message. Of course, the input of these reviews can and should be dismissed indiscriminately.
"Tears We Cannot Stop" can be read in one sitting, and it is resonant and magnetizing for the duration. Dyson's choice to format the book as a sermon is one that might put off some readers, but I found it to be charming and effective at pulling passion from the pages. And there is so much passion to be had; Dyson's prose is electric, whether he is regaling the reader with personal anecdotes or current events or positing to his beloved reader the things they can do to combat racism.
In deeply troubling times, "Tears We Cannot Stop" is church for the believer and non-believer alike, simultaneously crushing and uplifting and thoroughly uncompromising.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2024perspective
Top reviews from other countries
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Rollo 1967Reviewed in Italy on May 3, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars L'America nera spiegata ai bianchi
Dyson è un autore che sa perfettamente usare la maestria per comunicare concetti chiave, spesso delicati, dal punto di vista "nero" verso un pubblico "bianco". Una delle voci più autorevoli per conoscere il punto di vista "dall'altra parte" dell'America e smontare le costruzioni posticce che ce ne danno una prospettiva falsata o nel migliore dei casi distorta.
- SheilinaReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read... stop, read, learn, apply...
A seminal book full of insights, observations and emotional experiences. Rarely does a book move me so much that I find I have to slowly read and absorb each phrase, each paragraph. A compelling read.
- GeoffReviewed in Canada on March 22, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars A Book To Challenge Yourself
This is a book to challenge you. It went from 1 star in the beginning to earning 5 stars at the end based on the amount of thinking, analyzing and introspection he forces one to consider while reading this sermon.
I picked up this book as I have a lot of respect for Dr. Dyson after seeing some of his interviews and his debate with Jordan Peterson. He is most definitely a very intelligent, well read and quick-witted individual. I wanted to read something to give me an intelligent outlook on White America from a Black American perspective and this book did not disappoint.
While reading this I took notes, writing at times lengthy analysis on where I felt he is either right or wrong regarding a specific subject and my own personal opinion of his reasoning and/or viewpoint mixed with facts to back up my conclusions. I will not write about that in this review because this is not the place for that.
To summarize, he provides a sermon to White America about what it has done to Black America and what White America can do to heal the damage done. Along the way you may not agree with a lot of what he says. You may also be surprised at some insights he provides that you may not have considered, and you will also agree with a number of points he makes. Personally, I found him bias in much of his analysis, but you'll find out why that is.
Challenge yourself along the way over everything he says, and you will come away the better. At the end he provides a great reading list and list of individuals to follow on social media for further understanding.
Very highly recommended! Five plus stars.
- tserofinReviewed in Canada on September 22, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for white people
Extremely well written by an eminent scholar. Not preachy just full of hard truths. If this book doesn't change your mind about the prevalence of racism in America, nothing will.
- PegsReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it
I really enjoyed this book. It was telling some hard truths, but in a compassionate manner. It impacted me more I think because I read it in the last couple of months where issues of social justice have been more prominent internationally. So much learning here for those who want to take a participatory approach in investing themselves in issues of social justice.