Talks & Entertainment

In the wake of the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling last summer, public intellectual and social critic Michael Eric Dyson wrote an impassioned op-ed for the New York Times, “Death in Black and White.” Eschewing his scholarly voice, Dyson instead spoke directly from his heart about the grief and rage that engulfed black America. He also spoke bluntly to white America, asking his fellow white citizens to take off their blinders and see the true state of race in the nation. Dyson’s essay garnered so many responses that the comment section had to be shut down at 2,500.

In Tears We Cannot Stop, Dyson amplifies the themes he first voiced in his op-ed that addressed a nation teetering on the edge of the political abyss and enflamed with raw racial tension. Dyson digs deep into our racial past while also offering the most up to date investigation of the crises we confront, as well as the opportunities we have to make things better. Dyson offers a unique and empowering blend of historical perspective and contemporary analysis as he probes whiteness in America and how it has reasserted itself as Donald J. Trump becomes President.

Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, has been an ordained minister for 35 years, and is a contributing editor for 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. In conversation with Wesley Lowery, a journalist for the Washington Post and the author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. Book signing to follow.