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Michael Eric Dyson
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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America Kindle Edition

by Michael Eric Dyson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 2,852 ratings
Goodreads Choice Award nominee
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NOW A NEW YORK TIMES, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, INDIEBOUND, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, CHRONICLE HERALD, SALISBURY POST, GUELPH MERCURY TRIBUNE, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER | NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: The Washington Post • Bustle • Men's Journal • The Chicago Reader • StarTribune • Blavity• The Guardian • NBC New York's Bill's Books • Kirkus • Essence

“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race ... a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and King's Why We Can't Wait." —The New York Times Book Review

Toni Morrison hails Tears We Cannot Stop as "Elegantly written and powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish."

Stephen King says: "Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid…If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know—what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen."

Short, emotional, literary, powerful—Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop—a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

"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."

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  1. Print length
    234 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    St. Martin's Press
  5. Publication date
    January 17, 2017
  6. File size
    1720 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
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Get to know this book

Previous page

  1. What's it about?

    A powerful and provocative call for change in race relations, exploring difficult truths and offering guidance for moral redemption.

  2. Amazon editors say...

    In his call for change, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson asks white Americans to open their eyes to inequality.
    Adrian Liang, Amazon Editor
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wow! Eloquently delivered, sermon-style, without anger or bitterness, this is one of the most heartfelt calls to action I’ve ever heard." -Audible Range

"Michael Eric Dyson's elegant discussion of the role of race and privilege in white culture proves to be simultaneously provocative and sincere. Because he has framed his book as a sermon, audio is a natural medium for the work." -AudioFile Magazine

About the Author

Michael Eric Dyson is one of America's premier public intellectuals. He occupies the distinguished position of University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University, is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and a contributing editor of The New Republic and ESPN's The Undefeated. Ebony magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans, and one of the 150 most powerful blacks in the nation.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01KFX66SQ
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (January 17, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 17, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1720 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 234 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 2,852 ratings

About the author

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Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson

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Michael Eric Dyson is an award winning author, a widely celebrated Georgetown University professor, a prominent public intellectual and a noted political analyst. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he is also an ordained Baptist minister. Dyson is a two-time NAACP Image Award winner (Why I Love Black Women, and Is Bill Cosby Right?), and the winner of the American Book Award for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. His book The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America was a Kirkus Prize finalist. Dyson has written 19 books, and edited another one, over his nearly 25-year publishing career. He is also a highly sought after public speaker who is known to excite both secular and sacred audiences. Follow him on Twitter @michaeledyson and on his official Facebook page (facebook.com/michaelericdyson)

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
2,852 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the writing quality very well written, imaginative, and important. They also describe the emotional storyline as raw, optimistic, daring, courageous, and personalized. Readers describe the content as enlightening, reflective, and lyrical. However, some find the book often painful to read.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

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Writing qualityContentTruthfulnessEmotional storylineEmotional intensityRelevanceReadability
219 customers mention "Writing quality"219 positive0 negative

Customers find the book compelling and beautifully written. They also say the prose is electric and the book offers a framework and lexicon for engagement. Readers also mention that the book is one of the most important books of their time, with clear messages and an interesting style. They say the book explains racial concepts in easy to hear language and in palatable steps that are easily understood.

"...exceptional read for believer and non-believer alike as it offers a framework and lexicon for us to engage with one another as we work our way..." Read more

"...Dyson is imaginative, and has many suggestions for how an individual or group “I.R.A.”—an Individual Reparations Account...." Read more

"...And there is so much passion to be had; Dyson's prose is electric, whether he is regaling the reader with personal anecdotes or current events or..." Read more

"...Dr. Dyson explains racial concepts in easy to hear language and specifically targets white folks...." Read more

153 customers mention "Content"145 positive8 negative

Customers find the book enlightening, lucid, and full of memorable anecdotes. They also say the message is clear, doable, and thoughtful. Readers describe the book as informative, crucial, and courageous.

"...You have entrusted us with your most profound insights, personal experiences, and extend a vulnerability that humbles and arrests me...." Read more

"...The whole thing is incredibly current and topical, with commentary on Black Lives Matter, the recent election and Donald Trump’s rise to power...." Read more

"...for the believer and non-believer alike, simultaneously crushing and uplifting and thoroughly uncompromising." Read more

"...It is uncomfortable at times, challenging, and also encouraging...." Read more

42 customers mention "Truthfulness"35 positive7 negative

Customers find the book truthful, heartfelt, and convicting.

"...The writing of this book is the ultimate act of truth and forgiveness...." Read more

"...this book was beneficial and beautiful to me - and heartbreaking, convicting, and so on. Read it please!" Read more

"...It answers many questions factually, while Mr. Dyson gives you the real pain." Read more

"...called a sermon, but it doesn't come across as "preachy." Just honest. Which is actually refreshing...." Read more

23 customers mention "Emotional storyline"18 positive5 negative

Customers find the storyline very well written with lots of raw emotion brought to the surface. They also say it's humbling, personal, and inspiring. Readers also mention that the book is beautiful, sad, and enlightening. They say the story is optimistic, daring, and courageous.

"...Michael Eric Dyson delivers a powerful, engaging, personal, informational, inspiring sermon that’s essential at this moment in time when racial..." Read more

"...; he writes this book with the cadence and beauty of an inspiring, humbling, and deeply moving church sermon...." Read more

"...few years and this book was beneficial and beautiful to me - and heartbreaking, convicting, and so on. Read it please!" Read more

"...This book did not do that. It just made me sad and feel horrible and want to walk away to avoid the whole mess. I'm not doing that...." Read more

17 customers mention "Emotional intensity"17 positive0 negative

Customers find the book powerful, essential, and loving. They also say it's enlightening, horrifying, and encouraging.

"...Michael Eric Dyson delivers a powerful, engaging, personal, informational, inspiring sermon that’s essential at this moment in time when racial..." Read more

"Powerful Book!!..." Read more

"...It shouldn't be; I should know this. It is enlightening, loving, horrifying, encouraging; I can't find enough words...." Read more

"This is a beautiful and powerful book that demands white people look more closely, more honestly, at the fatal and lingering consequences of our..." Read more

14 customers mention "Relevance"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book timely, with a sermon delivered in a challenging but loving manner. They also say the author is able to capture the hopes, dreams, fears, and memories of all skin colors.

"Timely, provocative, brilliant, painful, and, ultimately, a very necessary step toward authentic national healing and transformation...." Read more

"...It is uncomfortable at times, challenging, and also encouraging...." Read more

"This book is spot on in it's timing, the message and a clear, doable, call to action, I began before I finished the book...." Read more

"Michael Eric Dyson is a true wordsmith and he is able to capture the hopes, dreams, fears and memories of Black America...." Read more

20 customers mention "Readability"5 positive15 negative

Customers find the book painful to read and hard for white audiences. They also say it's not a quick read and not well spoken.

"...It is uncomfortable at times, challenging, and also encouraging...." Read more

"...This is a hard book to read, at least if you are white...." Read more

"Timely, provocative, brilliant, painful, and, ultimately, a very necessary step toward authentic national healing and transformation...." Read more

"...This book did not do that. It just made me sad and feel horrible and want to walk away to avoid the whole mess. I'm not doing that...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Jennifer Wiley
5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, painful
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2017
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Timely, provocative, brilliant, painful, and, ultimately, a very necessary step toward authentic national healing and transformation. As a white, long-time fellow traveler, I am so grateful that Dr. Dyson has answered his calling to lead us toward redemptive justice with truth, decency and love--albeit, at times, necessary tough love. I am in my third read already and learning more and more each time.

Dyson's sermon serves as an exceptional read for believer and non-believer alike as it offers a framework and lexicon for us to engage with one another as we work our way through ongoing racially turbulent and polarized times. I am not a critic by trade so I will leave the professional analysis to the experts. I am a K-12 educator and seeker of social justice. I found this work both accessible and challenging in the best of ways. In my daily work, the evidence of the invention of whiteness, white innocence and white fragility and their pernicious impacts are ubiquitously abundant such that Dyson’s claims simply cannot be denied.

Dyson’s sermon is not always a comfortable read. That’s the point. It is a workout for the soul and psyche that results in the growing pains necessary for personal and collective liberation.

Thank you, Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, for opening your head and heart so broadly and deeply there is room enough for all of us in this racial healing process. The writing of this book is the ultimate act of truth and forgiveness. You have entrusted us with your most profound insights, personal experiences, and extend a vulnerability that humbles and arrests me. As you shared in a recent interview, "your trust in us grows out of forgiveness and the demand for truth for which is stands on, and the love it seeks to extend". Amen! I am in!
11 people found this helpful
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Elizabeth Bennett
5.0 out of 5 stars If we care about racism and white privilege, what should we do?
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2017
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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.
86 people found this helpful
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Jessica Sullivan
5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, challenging, and inspiring. An essential read
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2017
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This is a book that I challenge all my white friends to read, no matter where you stand on the spectrum of confronting white privilege and systemic racism. Michael Eric Dyson delivers a powerful, engaging, personal, informational, inspiring sermon that’s essential at this moment in time when racial division is especially high.

I urge you to read with an open heart and mind, to set aside your discomfort and listen to Dyson’s plea for white Americans to reckon with the harsh truths of racism.

Dyson is an ordained minister, so what better way to present this than as a sermon. He divides it into multiple sections: in “Hymns of Praise,” he cleverly shares hymns in the form of rap lyrics; in “Scripture Reading,” he quotes Martin Luther King Jr.; in the main sermon, he addresses whiteness specifically (including white innocence, white fragility, and white privilege) and then segues into a section about what it’s like to be black in America. Following that is “Benediction,” one of my favorite parts: in it he offers practical suggestions for what white people can do to make things better.

The whole thing is incredibly current and topical, with commentary on Black Lives Matter, the recent election and Donald Trump’s rise to power.

For white people who seek to understand more about racism and white privilege in America (and really, that should be all of us), this is the book to read. It was literally written for us.
30 people found this helpful
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Bob Henry
4.0 out of 5 stars understanding
Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2024
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perspective
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Top reviews from other countries

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Rollo 1967
5.0 out of 5 stars L'America nera spiegata ai bianchi
Reviewed in Italy on May 3, 2024
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Dyson è un autore che sa perfettamente usare la maestria per comunicare concetti chiave, spesso delicati, dal punto di vista "nero" verso un pubblico "bianco". Una delle voci più autorevoli per conoscere il punto di vista "dall'altra parte" dell'America e smontare le costruzioni posticce che ce ne danno una prospettiva falsata o nel migliore dei casi distorta.
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Sheilina
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read... stop, read, learn, apply...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2021
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A seminal book full of insights, observations and emotional experiences. Rarely does a book move me so much that I find I have to slowly read and absorb each phrase, each paragraph. A compelling read.
One person found this helpful
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Geoff
5.0 out of 5 stars A Book To Challenge Yourself
Reviewed in Canada on March 22, 2019
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This is a book to challenge you. It went from 1 star in the beginning to earning 5 stars at the end based on the amount of thinking, analyzing and introspection he forces one to consider while reading this sermon.

I picked up this book as I have a lot of respect for Dr. Dyson after seeing some of his interviews and his debate with Jordan Peterson. He is most definitely a very intelligent, well read and quick-witted individual. I wanted to read something to give me an intelligent outlook on White America from a Black American perspective and this book did not disappoint.

While reading this I took notes, writing at times lengthy analysis on where I felt he is either right or wrong regarding a specific subject and my own personal opinion of his reasoning and/or viewpoint mixed with facts to back up my conclusions. I will not write about that in this review because this is not the place for that.

To summarize, he provides a sermon to White America about what it has done to Black America and what White America can do to heal the damage done. Along the way you may not agree with a lot of what he says. You may also be surprised at some insights he provides that you may not have considered, and you will also agree with a number of points he makes. Personally, I found him bias in much of his analysis, but you'll find out why that is.

Challenge yourself along the way over everything he says, and you will come away the better. At the end he provides a great reading list and list of individuals to follow on social media for further understanding.

Very highly recommended! Five plus stars.
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canuck_cougar
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for white people
Reviewed in Canada on September 22, 2022
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Extremely well written by an eminent scholar. Not preachy just full of hard truths. If this book doesn't change your mind about the prevalence of racism in America, nothing will.
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Pegs
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2020
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I really enjoyed this book. It was telling some hard truths, but in a compassionate manner. It impacted me more I think because I read it in the last couple of months where issues of social justice have been more prominent internationally. So much learning here for those who want to take a participatory approach in investing themselves in issues of social justice.
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