Table Of ContentTEARS WE CANNOT STOP
A Sermon to White America
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
St. Martin’s Press New York
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To
Beyoncé Knowles Carter
Lover of Black People
Genius and Greatest Living Entertainer
Feminist and Global Humanitarian
Solange Knowles
Lover of Black People
Amazing Artist
Fearless Advocate for the Vulnerable
Tina Knowles-Lawson
Lover of Black People
Gifted Fashion Designer and Philanthropist
Loving Matriarch
What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of
ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay,
whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western
achievements, and transform them . . . The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom
of the Negro . . . He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright
or as dark as his.
—James Baldwin
I.
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
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