The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

Book Overview

Over the past ten years, the work of Michael Eric Dyson has become the first stop for readers, writers, and thinkers eager for uncommon wisdom on the racial and political dynamics of contemporary America. Whether writing on religion or sexuality or notions of whiteness, on Martin Luther King, Jr. or Tupac Shakur, Dyson's keen insight and rhetorical flair continue to surprise and challenge. This collection gathers the best of Dyson's growing body of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465017711
• ISBN13: 9780465017713
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Civitas Book Publisher
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Fraud

Before you waste your money, watch him debate his points on race on YouTube. He gets exposed time and again as a race baiting fool that he is. Judge for yourself

Rave from a nice, middle-class gent

Dyson on BookTV impressed me to death, so I decided to pick up this book. It's not that I didn't know racism existed (I'd have had to have lived in a bubble), but it seems to me that Dyson gets to the center of things quickly and incisively. His experience, though by no means the same as mine (protected and downright cushy), nevertheless jived scarily closely to my observations. I particularly applaud his puncturing of the "bootstrap" mentality and his emphasis on the far more realistic view that we all depend on one another and that we have obligations not only to ourselves and to our family, but also to our society. These obligations are in the nature of debts for help we have received. This, of course, has been known ever since Dickens (and probably Jesus) at least. The Rugged Individualist is never completely alone. I've had the advantage of great schools and wonderful teachers, as well as people I've never met who've helped me. This is to me Dyson's best idea. Just of my own interests, I liked the arts essays best. To me, Dyson's is a mind I want to spend more time with.

Excellent book!

This is an excellent book by an excellent Author! I will collect all of his books.

Don Quixote American Style

Dyson's book is intellectual fancy footwork at its delicious best. But in the end it too is all but sound and fury about nothing. These very fresh and eclectic essays explain everything but resolve nothing. There is no return address for those responsible for screwing up Western Civilization so badly. Except for an impassioned appeal to return to Christian love and to expand the paradigm of Christian understanding (most eleganly expressed in his outline of Homoerotic Theology), Dyson's intellectual two-step continues to beg the questions: who is responsible and what is to be done about the moral mess made of America and more generally, Western Civilization? Dyson is nothing if not an "intellectual devil" busy digging up and kicking up dust in all of the wrong places (the OJ trial, MLK plagialism and womanizing, Black preachers womanizing, ect.) "Braindead America" needs nothing more badly than it needs an intellectual provocatuer like Dyson--a veritable font of new ideas: the man's mind is on fire! However, it is not enough to go about willy-nilly across the American landscape slaying easy to kill dragons and flailing at easily targetable sacred cows. The real intellectual challenge is to do what Robert Jensen at the University of Texas at Austin has done: Put your intellectual money where your intellectual mouth is: Put that powerful intellect in service to solving problems and into making fundamental changes in this bankrupt American way of life. [Look at New Orleans, for Gods sake?] It is easy enough, if you are a black intellectual to take the moral highground and rain down sortie-after-sortie upon America's 51st state--the State of Denial--but it is quite another task to admit that had Christianity itself not been sound asleep at the wheel, we might NOW have a very different kind of America. While whites continue to wallow (scared to death) in their privilege and prerogatives (while Rome burns), black intellectuals like Dyson and Cornel West stay as close to them as possible, ever-jabbing them in the sides hoping that some of the crumbs from the tree of privilege will fall upon them. This is a hellava way to fight racism, sexism, homophobism, and all other brands of chauvinism but what else can they do? Black intellectuals have the elitist racist "neocons" on one side and the elitist racist "liberals" on the other, and the elitist racist Christians in the middle. They are hemmed-in on all sides. No wonder all they do is flail, Don Quioxite-like at the racist American windmills. But if they keep flailing, they too will eventually find their footing. Please keep flailing. Five stars!!

Speaking Power to Racism?

When all is said and done, living under the umbrella of a racist society takes a depressing toll on and is inevitably unsettling to us all. Judging by Michael Eric Dyson's Reader, it seems that the most psychic damage is done to the "so-called" black intellectual than to anyone else in our society. It is a truism seldom expressed openly that since Freud, there are no more secrets: everything is transparent. Every hustler's hold card can now be peeked at. Whites, hustling American society have no choice but to live out their lives retreating from the only thing that gives them a sense of meaning and identity, their only rallying cry to group solidarity: the long dark self-defining shadow of white supremacy. They have nowhere to hide; it defines them; it is the only (inner or outer) garment they have. It is who they are. It defines the parameters of their humanity. They are condemned to defend its evils whether they want to or not: forever trying to innocently (and with great detachment and no sense of taint) explain why it happened; ever wishing and hoping that no one looks at all the tangible and intangible perks, advantages, prerogatives and privileges they still accrue from it. And pretending not to remember that this unmitigated evil of inhumanity remains the gravity that controls the American cultural universe. From an early age, the indispensable life skill for whites (even today, as it was at the founding of this nation), is forgetting that everything meaningful they value and believe in has already been fatally compromised and corrupted by, or remains inextricably tied to a six hundred-year culture of racism. Whites must learn at an early age to deny (or worse yet, how to be content living with) the fact that beyond racism, there is nothing else to "being white." Through racism, whites have raped their own humanity from the inside out: Nothing meaningful is left but excuses, bombast, false claims and the elevation and objectification of superiority by fiat. In the end, it is all so much smoke and mirrors. Racism has made American humanity a smoldering dessert. Only the outer shell of humane existence remains. Look at what happened in New Orleans with hurricane Katrina? Why can't black intellectuals like Dyson and Cornel West come out and say this, straight up? Why are they always pussyfooting around the edges, teasing us; pretending that they want to be us; want to represent us. They want to be everything to us: They are all preachers, rappers, graduates of the "hood," etc. ad infinitum. [Freud would have a lot to say about all this internal confusion of our black intellectuals.] I'll tell you why they cannot say it, because for blacks, the existential reality (and crisis) of living under the shadow of racism is even more complicated than for whites. We must, one and all, live out the duality W.E.B. du Bois warned us about; inevitably coming to realize and then eventually admitting to ourselves that we are both th

Straight fire!

Michael Eric Dyson comes with pure fire. He is a living legend. I have read numerous articles by him, heard and seen him on TV and radio programs, and perused a few books of his, such as Open Mike, Why I Love Black Women, Between God and Gangsta Rap, but until now, I had never owned a copy, just used my library card or sat at the bookstore, but I can say in all earnest: Dyson is certified. He does not care for props, is disinterested with intellectual pretensions, zealously combats elitism, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. I don't even need to delineate what a raconteur he is, it goes without saying. What I love most about Dyson is how he is able to understand that be it a Kanye West track All Falls Down or Wittgenstein's close to Tractatus, the sheer religosity of a Prince performance, or B Cosby appeasing white people at the cost of others, at the expense of his own dignity and so-called humanism, or affirmative action, etc., that it all exists on the same plane, and he approaches each with due respect and consideration. I can't say more. This is a real nice compilation of his work, and a good intro to anyone into reading Dyson. His piece on El DeBarge is missing, or else I'd give it 5 stars. I give it 4.75 instead. From a young cat, university student, to quote Q-Tip, again: Michael Eric Dyson is "certified." Peace.