★★★★★ 5
If we care about racism and white privilege, what should we do?
Format: Kindle
One hundred and fifty-two years ago, slavery ended in the United States. And yet the tentacles of that time touch lives every day, all these years later.
What can be done to make things better? Michael Eric Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University, and an ordained Baptist minister, suggests that white people who care about the lives of black people should make individual reparations. In his book, Tears We Cannot Stop …A Sermon to White America, Dyson says, “{Black people} 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.”
The book, unlike Dyson’s other scholarly works, takes the form of a worship service, and uses the concept of an extended sermon, or jeremiad, to lead the reader through confession, repentence, and redemption “through the long night of despair to the bright day of hope.” In Dysons’s view, “whiteness is a problem to be struggled with,” and his book is of inestimable value in grappling with the struggle.
The book speaks at length of police brutality against black people, and fervently tries to create empathy in white readers. It includes an extraordinary bibliography of books which give insight and voice to black history, oppression, pain, achievement, and lives.
And it speaks of reparations, and our responsibility as white beneficiaries of an unequal system, to take concrete actions to right the wrong, the change our country and the lives of our black sisters and brothers and their children.
Dyson is imaginative, and has many suggestions for how an individual or group “I.R.A.”—an Individual Reparations Account. We could buy books for black college students, overpay our black accountant or hairdresser, pay the black person who cuts our grass double the amount on the bill, give to the United Negro College Fund, and more. He suggests that faith groups consider giving 10% of their revenues to a church I.R.A. In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Dyson says, “If the sermon ain’t making you a little bit uncomfortable, it ain’t effective. Look, if it doesn’t cost you anything, you’re not really engaging in change: you’re engaging in convenience. I’m asking you to do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do. I’m asking you to think more seriously and strategically about why you possess and what you possess…..you ain’t got to ask the government, you don’t have to ask your local politician—this is what you, an individual, conscientious, ‘woke’ citizen can do.
I have read many—though surely not all—of the books Dyson recommends. I have grappled with white privilege as a mother of black children, a fighter against apartheid, a civil rights activist, a human being. I have never read anything which more cogently offers “woke whites” a path to being a part of the change. I urge you to read Tears We Cannot Stop …A Sermon to White America, and to take your place in the pantheon of people who help this country grow beyond its racist past.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2017
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