The Zeppos Report #16 with Michael Eric Dyson
I'm Nick Zeppos Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Welcome to the Zeppos report. A podcast where I talk with the people shaping and helping us understand our world. My guest today scholar and author Dr.Michael Eric Dyson. Michael is visiting Vanderbilt today to deliver the keynote address for our annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Commemoration. Michael is a university professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
There he's made his mark doing work across every conceivable discipline every conceivable classical and modern format and really enlightening us on the world our nation. An African-American cultural analysis Michael is known by many as a hip-hop public intellectual and not many people also know that became an ordained minister at age 19.
He has authored and edited numerous books and his most recent work is entitled Tears We Cannot Stop, A Sermon to White America. He's joining me today to discuss his latest book and to reflect upon the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on this significant day of remembrance and reflection.
Michael welcome to The Zeppos Report. Chancellor as always great to see you my friend. And it's a honor to be here.
Yeah I feel like it's kind of a reunion for us so aged 19,
I think back when I was 19. I don't know what I was called to. You were called the ministry. Tell me about that first step in the journey.
Well you know I grew up in Detroit Michigan. I was 9 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. The year before that dirty trail of smoke creased the horizon and I inquired of my mother what is that. And she told me it was a dirty pig a dirty pig it caused an urban rebellion to write dirty pig. What does that Blind Blind Pig is what they call them actually after hours joint. I don't know what that meant so I'm in Detroit with the urban rebellion slash riots slash revolution. Then the next year Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. I had no idea who he was that never heard his name and when I saw him on television it instantly attracted me to him and to the use of words to move people. Because as that last speech he gave I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight we as a people will get to the Promised Land.
I was like my God. Who is that.
And I went out and you know the next day sent out with my little allowance money for a little 45 record of the recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. excerpts from them and it was a conversion experience in a very fundamental way. And that drew me to understanding oratory as an art. And then later when my pastor came to my church at 12 years old Dr. Frederick Sampson now dead God bless his soul. But a remarkable man a man who knew Shakespeare by heart. Much of the poetry of the English language was not foreign to him. And he had committed much of it to memory and wasn't intellectual of the highest order. And that gave me a sense that you could be a minister and you could be really smart and you can do scholarly things. So you know that and Martin Luther King Jr. and other factors drew me to the Ministry of now is my call at 21 I was licensed. And then shortly after that ordained those for the last 38 some odd years. You know I've been part of the ministry and it was that calling that sense of duty and responsibility to not only God as I perceived God to be but to one's community. How can I best serve the people who have loved and nurtured me. How can I best repay the effort of investment by showing that I'm serious about what I do and what I am and what I say and feeling a connection to my minister Dr. Sampson gave me an idea of the path I could take, and that set me on the way.
And as a result of that I acknowledged my call and began to minister.
I've pastored three different churches along the way but my ministry has mostly been intellectual engagement as a professor and so on. Well tell me you use so wonderfully kind of your mentor and art and word and using those skills.
How have you been so able you know when you think of Reverend Sampson and then to write this path breaking book Between God and Gangsta Rap, where how did, what was that spiritual artistic intellectual journey like. That's a great question.
You know when I was called to the ministry and I began to think about my life in those cloistered and some would say sanctified walls I felt something was missing.
However I felt that as important a duty as that is it had to interact with the broader universe of thought and feeling and emotion both in terms of the activism that was there in the communities in which I was nurtured.
You know my father was an automobile factory worker. He worked in a Kelsey Hayes Wheel Brake and Drum company. I called at my alma mater my father's alma mater because I worked there for a while myself in a factory. So and I was he was a master set up man, I was I was doing you know arc welding and so on and then unloading train trucks. The reason I have a bad back now is that I was unloading 50 pound will break drums in a day. So it let me know what the political world afoot there lot of things are going on police brutality program in Detroit called stress stop the robberies enjoy safe streets was afoot. A lot of black men dying unjustly at the hands of police. So the political world had to have some kind of interconnection with the religious world more than I saw. And then secondly popular culture what people listen to the songs they listen to the movies they look at you know how can they be interpreted within a framework of both faith or serious intellectual reflection about what's going on between the community pop culture and the life of the mind. So all that stuff was interesting to me and I said I've got to blaze a different path. I've got to figure out a way to join all of my interests. I love The Godfather as a film. You know I love listening to R&B music and Marvin Gaye and I also was deeply connected to social justice movements even early on I began to speak in public at the age of 11.
I wrote a speech at 11 won a contest at 12 the oratorical contest where the Optimist Club so I wanted to find a way to bring all of that stuff together. And I began to write and think about popular culture early on and as a second year graduate student I published my first professional piece. There was a magazine then called Christianity and Crisis is no longer there. Reinhold Niebuhr and others for it and I wrote my first piece Rap Race and Religion. I was a second year graduate student at Princeton and I began to write professionally then that allowed me to bring together all of my interests under one umbrella and allow me to think about pop culture about you know God about religion and about the world of social justice at the same time.
Well I find the newest book Tears We Cannot Stop,
it's structured as a sermon and I'm not a minister, yet
you know as I see the world I see the universe I see the nation it's who is preaching, who's preaching.
And so then you say that these are moral and spiritual passions that can lead us to a better day in our union.
And you know I'm maybe just a narrow lawyer and you know I taught constitutional law and all these things and my students over the years as it was the most important part of the First Amendment the Fourteenth Amendment, and I just finally I kind of about 12 years it was well it's those three words We the People want a more perfect union. So you know what is, how do we you know lead to the better day in our nation.
You know that you know beloved community that a more perfect union. Yes. And then how in a more pluralistic America.
And I don't mean to suggest that there wasn't the kind of pluralism but yet how does that carry through in this very pluralistic society that we have now.
Yeah well I think one of the geniuses of the founding fathers, as it were was the fact that disestablishment clause was pretty big that in order for no religion to be in order for one religion to be dominant none must be. Enshrined in public space given the imprimatur of the state. This is not England. This is not the Church of America and that genius even though a lot of people as you know mistakenly call this a Christian nation.
South Africa is an officially Christian nation. How do you like that. So this is not a Christian nation and the Christianity practiced by as you know Thomas Jefferson it was radically dissimilar to what an evangelical pietist would practice now. The first thing Jefferson did was get rid of the miracles of anything that can't be empirically verified boom has got to be gone. Oh there's all your water to wine stuff. Yeah. So you know we say these things we bandy these terms about but you know what's more important is not whether or not we agree theologically or even if we have the same religion. What I've discovered at this age in my life is my religion is love. And I don't mean that sappy sentimental stuff Dr. King used to make those distinctions between Agape and Eros and Philia.
And so Agape is that self affirming other validating love. That love that says we are about community and even in our pluralistic society. This is especially critical now as I try to make an argument in that book. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. So if my religion is love. I've got to be concerned about gay lesbian transgender bisexual trans people. I've got to be concerned about you know Mexicans who are being demonized by a chief executive officer of the United States of America I'd be concerned about Muslim brothers and sisters who are victims of Islamophobia and the like. And on and on. If we are serious about this country we can't practice isolationist politics or xenophobia. We've got to have a sense of what holds us together in America. Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that we remembered is still an experiment. And it's a radically provocative and profound experiment and it's an experiment that we have to constantly hold in serious examination. However James Baldwin early in his life said I love America more than any nation on earth. Therefore I reserve the right to criticize her perpetually. And you know there's no such thing as we getting us as a nation getting better without us being able to be critical doesn't mean we don't love this nation. There's a difference between nationalism and patriotism patriotism says. I love my country and I want to make sure it does the right thing and when it's wrong
I've got to speak out and say it nationalism says I'm in a meeting with the president and I don't really recall whether or not he said X Y and Z.
So nationalism is an uncritical celebration of the nation to the exclusion of the virtue and value of self critique. So my thing is if we're living in a pluralistic nation what gets us there at the spiritual core of this nation is the openness to others and we can't get in the door and then slamming on somebody else. The first wave of immigrants gets in and then hates the other immigrants that come in. Then the other immigrants come in and then they don't like other people coming. You know we got them from Eastern Europe then we got them from Western Europe then we closed the door then we got them. You know we kept the Chinese out and we kept the Japanese out. Then we opened up in 65 and we said hey let's let a whole range of nations of color come in these doors and it transformed this nation. That's our strength. So when I think about pluralism I think without that plurality of voices that comes together it's a chorus of voices. Are they conflicting, to be sure. Are they sometimes contradictory, to be sure. But this is the beauty that de Tocqueville understood that Gunnar Myrdal understood, Murdo, that this is a nation best seen as a patchwork of diversities that agree that have consensus about the fact that we will try as a nation to provide space and opportunity for those who would like to reinforce the virtues of this society and our national culture. And so far with some vicious exceptions and some horrible mistakes we've made that experiment continues to inspire people to want to keep coming to America.
And we have to have that kind of openness in order to embrace them and embrace the best in us.
Let me turn to a New York Times piece that you wrote on the topic of race and sports. And it features a quote by Dr. King about the importance of black athletes integrating the baseball diamond in the 50s. And we recently announced a new Center for Sports and Society at Vanderbilt. We just had a wonderful event at the Museum in Washington D.C. where we showed a film on the crossing the color line in the SEC which happened at Vanderbilt.
I'm a someone we lost recently Perry Wallace and why does sports to you both...
you know I'm watching the Vikings yesterday and it's like you know people are hugging and it's. And they're crying and crying and they're talking about Jesus, they're talking about God they're doing holy dances. Yeah.
And I see that and then I see how it can just rip the country apart. Yes. So why. What is your view on the role of sports as a kind of mirror of the division.
Right, the struggle. But yet maybe a community of people .
Well you named it brilliantly by evoking that image of Mr. Diggs after he scored that touchdown. The improbability of it the miraculous character of it. This is a reflection of the nation a fledgling group of people against the tyranny of a nation that would impose taxes without fair representation that would impose such hardship upon their lives that they would seek to form a nation anew and to strike out in new territories so to speak so that's reflected in the sports rituals they reinforced for us and replay the very struggle to become who we are as a nation. That's why you and I and other people in this country we don't have to know each other's religion what our zip codes are what are what our academic backgrounds are or even what how much money we make. Did you see that unity among those have to be honest. Yeah. I mean how amazing was that. So it's a unifying theme. It's a unifying language that allows us to articulate our American identity. This is something we all saw that we all can cheer on even if we're on the opposite team. We see the extraordinary effort put forth. We see the result of discipline and we see on that playing field regardless of what your religion is or your money, because the guy making the play might make $600,000 the year the guy throwing the ball might make 3 million but the point is there a team and they pull their own weight and without doing it together they won't either. They won't individually be successful so that's a reflection of who we are as a nation.
Now on the other hand there are telling differences so that we also see in that same sport when we have extra athletic concerns.
When predominantly white owners even if they know to would officially collude or have a cabal of owners whose mindset you don't have to have a conspiracy when the real thing is operating effectively they don't have to have collusion when many of the mindsets of those owners is not going away. You don't like a guy who doesn't stand for the flag. And despite time after time an athlete to athletes and that's not what it's about and it's not against this president has started under Obama. So it is starting to Donald Trump. It's not against the flag but this is you know this is where your understanding is they're saying many of the players starting with Colin Kaepernick were doing this because a lot of people are unjustly hurt by the police and sometimes murdered.
We want to protest that. So during the playing of the national anthem as you know it's a compromise when Colin Kaepernick discovered that a veteran said hey that's disrespectful for you to sit. Why don't you just kneel as a show of reverence that's what we do.
And even that is misinterpreted. And then the irony of course is that many Americans say well why don't you do it a different way. Why don't you. The moment you say do it a different way you've lost the efficacy because the efficacy is in making us a bit uncomfortable like Dr. King did to draw attention to something that's wrong. The moment that the concern is not whether ColinKaepernick can win a game for me whether he can throw the ball a sufficient distance with an arc on that spiral that allows a player to catch it and therefore cross the goal line. You know the end zone. That's the concern that should be primary. But it's not. There are extra athletic considerations so sports reveals to us what's going on the quote from Dr. King. Dr. King told Don Newcombe who played after Jackie Robinson who you never you will never understand how you made a substitute argument for me. You made it easier to do what I did because when people like you or Larry Doby or you know Jackie Robinson they said well maybe it will give black people a chance because these guys are good and they're not what they say they are in terms of stereotypes. So they were ambassadors and sports can do that it can both bring us together. And unfortunately at the same time it is a mirror and it can rip us apart in a certain way.