Tears We Cannot Stop Read online

  Tears We Cannot Stop

  A Sermon to White America

  Michael Eric Dyson

  St. Martin’s Press New York

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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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 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.

  II.

  Hymns 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.”