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Michael Eric Dyson: Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
June 14, 2018 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm UTC+0
$20 – $45.KPFA Radio 94.1 FM & Marcus Books present
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
Hosted by Kevin Cartwright
Entry $20, entry & book $35, 2 entries & book $45, Tickets: 800-838-3006, or independent bookstores, Benefit KPFA, Info: kpfa.org/events
Michael Eric Dyson is one of America’s premier public intellectuals. The author of last year’s outstanding bestseller, “Tears We Cannot Stop,” Dyson is University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and an editor of The New Republic. Ebony magazine named him one of America’s 100 most influential African-Americans. In addition, Dyson is a uniquely outstanding public speaker, employing exceptionally deep knowledge with a talent for immediacy, terrific wit, and an extraordinarily rich voice.
His new book, What Truth Sounds Like deftly explores the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy- of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured landscape. Dr. Dyson examines key players today, from Jay-Z to Jordan Peele and LeBron James, from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Kamala Harris. He ends with a paean to Wakanda, the all too mythical nation celebrated in the film “Black Panther”. “If James Baldwin and his glorious crew could gather again, they could hardly have a better place to reconvene and let the beautiful momentum of blackness wash over them as they sought to make America truly great. For the first time.”
What Truth Sounds Like reveals how every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in a crucial meeting convened in 1963 when Robert F. Kennedy invited James Baldwin and a few of his friends to discuss Black America’s rage: disdain for black dissent, the belief that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood, and that they lack hustle and ingenuity.