Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
Michael Eric Dyson
St. Martin’s Press (2017). 228 pp.
Book Review
Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop promises to be “a sermon to White America”—a promise on which Dyson over-delivers. Tears is not merely a sermon; it is an entire liturgy. Whether or not it is truly for White America is, for the time being, an open question. Dyson’s tone and rhetoric often leaves him “preaching to the choir.” But even preaching to the choir has its place in the august history of homiletics. Dyson intentionally locates himself within the great American tradition of jeremiad. Thus, we are not surprised to find Dyson prodding and pleading his readers to return to the path of American holiness.
Tears is a worship service shaped around a sermonic exploration of Black existence in White America. The first part of the book includes chapters titled “Call to Worship,” “Hymns of Praise,” “Invocation,” and “Scripture Reading.” Dyson calls his audience to worship in the wake of the 2016 national election, with its subsequent racial strife. He is an evangelist for a better America. Like all great jeremiad preachers, Dyson points us backwards to draw us forwards. He tries to help us see where America went wrong to call us back to the straight and narrow. Quite simply, America went wrong when, in James Baldwin’s words, we insisted on thinking of ourselves as a “white nation”. Thus, the Call to Worship begins with the admonition to acknowledge the effects of America’s original racial sin and to repent.
Having been called to worship, the reader is now invited to meditate on the hymns of praise of the Black community. Dyson—who later admits that his “joyful embrace of the secular dimensions of black culture has landed [him] in trouble” (p. 69)—points the reader to “Sound of Da Police” by KRS-One and “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar as examples of music videos that remind us of the historically antagonistic relationship between police forces and the Black community. KRS-One sings about slaves overseers while his music plays over video footage from Selma. Kendrick Lamar joyfully sings, “We gonna be alright” while dancing over the cityscape of Los Angeles, before he is felled by a policer’s bullet. The Fugees’s Lauren Hill sings fearfully of the police as “the Beast” who roams the streets looking for her, and Beyonce sings about her childhood formation on a New Orleans police cruiser that is sinking in the waters of Hurricane Katrina while spray paint on a wind-damaged wall reads “Stop Shooting Us.” These are hymns that express Black suffering and Black hope in the same breath. They are sung by a people who refuse to be erased.
Next, Dyson invokes the presence of the Almighty God as a witness to the humanity of Black people over and against the many experiences that suggest otherwise. God is called to act in the face of stories about Dyson’s 6 year old daughter being called a “n***” at a skating rink, or Dyson’s adult son, a medical doctor, fearing for his life during a traffic stop in Harlem, or most concerning, white friends and allies who wring their hands and lament while remaining largely inert. Dyson pleads with God to convict this nation and to continue to give Black people the courage to continue to tell the truth.
In perhaps his most provocative attempt to blend sacred language and secular Black culture, Dyson appeals to the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. as “Scripture Reading” for America. King, Dyson reasons, is the “most quoted black man on the planet” (p. 37). He is “the greatest American prophet” and his words are “civic Holy Writ” and “political scripture” (p. 38). But like scripture itself, King is proof-texted and whitewashed. The words he spoke to white audiences are read without consideration of the words he spoke to black audiences; his comments on race are extricated from his words about the Vietnam War or the economy. America has not outlived the relevance of King’s words; he still has many important things to say for those who have ears to hear.
The central section of the book is the “Sermon”, a six-chapter exhortation to White Americans to seek repentance buttressed by personal testimonies of Blackness. The sermon begins with Dyson’s proclamation that whiteness is a fantasy. It only exists because we say it exists. But its continued existence threatens the very existence of America itself. For America to live, whiteness must die. The good news is that if whiteness is something we made up, we can unmake it. Unmaking whiteness, however, is hard, and it will require us to undergo a deep grieving of our attachment to the status quo. White people will have to move through the five stages of white grief: ignorance, denial, appropriation, revision, and dilution. Only after white people come to terms with the manifold ways they seek to evade blackness, will they be able to confront the problems facing America head-on.
The examples of white evasion are particularly pernicious and deny the testimonies of Black Americans. The first is the way white people police the use of the N-word, alternating between preventing Black people from using it and/or arguing that if Black people use it then white people ought to be able to use it also. A second type of evasion involves appeals to “black-on-black” crime to mitigate Black protests of systemic racism in American police forces. The final evasion involves the police themselves. White America’s presumption that police officers are always right makes it almost impossible to hold police officers accountable when they are wrong. Giving police officers the benefit of the doubt discounts the historical experience of pro-slavery and pro-Jim Crow police tactics.
The third part of the book includes sections titled, “Benediction,” “Offering Plate,” Prelude to Service,” and “Closing Prayer”, the most substantial of which is the Benediction. Here, Dyson offers his white congregants a series of practical steps they can take to repent of the negative effects of the sins of whiteness. These include suggestions like taking steps towards individual acts of reparation, like paying Black works above their quoted price or sponsoring tuition for Black students or summer campers. White readers should further educate themselves about the experience of Black Americans through reading classics in Black literature and American history. Then, they should seek to educate their friends and families. Making friends with Black people and visiting Black churches, schools, and jails are other important steps white people can take to effect real reconciliation between White and Black Americans. Finally, white people can choose to be present at protest events to change the optics that the issues being protested are not just “Black” issues, but American issues.
My initial concerns regarding Dyson’s “sermon” are theological in nature. I’m worried that he is more invested in the project of America than a Christian ought to be. He wants to save America by surgically removing the cancer of white nationalism from the body politic. Theologically, I’m more interested in asking whether American Christians need to be saved from the idea of America itself. In that regard, I am disappointed to see that Dyson—a Baptist preacher by training—does not spend time addressing White Christians specifically, or even Christianity more broadly. The use of jeremiad operates uncritically to reinforce the basic assumptions of American exceptionalism even as Dyson tries to recast Black Americans within the scope of that exception. And that worries me.
Yet, I find that criticism to be underwhelming even as I write it because I know that it is a criticism that can only be made from the position of one who is privileged enough to both benefit from American exceptionalism and call it into question. And that is, at least partially, Dyson’s point. We white Christians have all sorts of ways of obfuscating when we should be listening. What I hear most clearly at the heart of Dyson’s sermon is a call for white repentance. And repentance cannot begin in earnest if we listen to Black testimonies with a critical ear. For those who have ears, let them hear.
David Hunsicker is an associate pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, Alabama. He previously taught theology at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California, and was a youth pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary.
