Michael Eric Dyson (1958- ) has been called one of America’s foremost black thinkers. He is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and a talking head on NPR, CNN and Bill Maher. He is well known for opposing the views of Bill Cosby about poor blacks.
He sounds like a preacher but talks about hip hop. He thinks for himself and tries to get past what he calls “the labored seductions of all narrow views of black life, whether they be racist, essentialist, or otherwise uncritically disposed toward African American culture.”
As a scholar he has written books for the general public on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Tupac Shakur and gangsta rap, presenting the truth, as best as it can be known, against the simple-minded, self-serving ideas most people have about such things. He has also written books about Katrina, Bill Cosby’s views, the colour line and why he loves black women!
He wrote “Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X” (1994) so that people now and in the future, in America and abroad, can understand what Malcolm X was all about and how his ideas can help them. Both Angela Davis and Chuck D say it is a great book.
Bill Cosby blames poor blacks for their own troubles. He sounds almost white. Dyson says Cosby only looks at what blacks are doing wrong, not at what whites are doing wrong, which is just as much a part of the picture.
Dyson grew up in Detroit’s black middle-class in the 1960s and 1970s. He read through the Harvard Classsics, the great writings of dead white men, and listened to Motown.
At 16 he got a scholarship to a good boarding school. When he arrived there he got the shock of his life: nearly everyone was white. He now saw that he had grown up all his life knowing only black people. The racism he faced there – the names, his room getting messed up and his stuff destroyed – made him angry and before long he got kicked out.
His life went down hill from there: soon he had a baby on the way and no work except to hustle on the streets. But he kept going to church. He loved speaking so he found out how to become a Baptist minister. In time that led him to study, and then later to teach at some of the top universities in the land. He started writing too, at first to get some money to help his brother, who was in prison on a second-degree murder charge.
Dyson once said of himself:
I think of myself as a Trojan Horse. I don’t have an earring in my nose or ear. I don’t have my hair combed back in a ponytail, or rough-hewn. I look like an insider. But there’s a whole lot of Negroes inside of me. There’s a whole lot of black men inside of me. And when I get in somewhere, I let them out.
See also:
- Katrina
- Malcolm X
- Martin Luther King, Jr
- Tupac Shakur
- Bill Cosby
- hip hop music
- black ghetto
- black middle class in America
Dyson is just your typical race-pimp, telling black people what they want to hear. His Jesse Jackson oratory style (talk louder than your opponent and use consonance and rhyme whenever possible) is a cover-up for his lack of original or dynamic thought.
As you can see from his story, he’s a product of his environment and has failed to avoid the traps that befall young black men. Why anyone would think that he has the solutions to black America’s problems is a mystery to me.
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I think Dyson is interesting, but I’m not sure if I’m a fan or not.
Did you see the poorly edited but potentially though provoking piece on CNN’s Black In America about how the color line influenced the dramatically different life turnout between him and his brother?
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I have heard flashes of brilliance from Michael Dyson, especially in his work about Malcolm X. I’ve also heard some paint by numbers race pimp twaddle. He’s an intensely smart man, but he does a lot of his thinking and reckoning publicly. Thus, what he says is at times ill-considered or directionless. In the end, though, Michael almost always says what he means. He’s always genuine, always painfully, brutally honest, and I give him props for that.
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i like michael because he doesn’t sugar coat nothing and speak what’s on his mind. it’s kind of dumb for someone to say that he’s a typical race pimp and trying to say what black people want to hear is stupid. i think what he is doing is positive.
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Good Stuff!
Go
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i wrote an essay on dyson if you get a chance check it out http://copper30.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/michael-eric-dyson/ i included some of his video i’d just seen him give a talk at georgetown i actually watched the talk on fora.tv they host speeches and such he always makes good points and he is a pointed speaker for the hip hop generation
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Oh cool. Thanks.
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Such a shame Dyson has lost some of his independence or autonomous thinking. He’s basically pro-Obama (despite referring to Obama as Pharaoh, not Moses) and wasted a lot of time with a very, very personal attack on Cornel West. I think of him like Melissa Harris-Perry: an Obamabot like most people on MSNBC
His cultural criticism in the 1990s was interesting. And his critique of Bill Cosby was needed.
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I like what he says. He always tells it like it is.
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