Publishers Weekly
10/26/2020
Georgetown University sociology professor Dyson (What Truth Sounds Like) offers heartfelt letters to victims of racial injustice in America. In a letter to Emmett Till, Dyson considers how the phenomenon of inherited racial trauma (“We feel the history in our bones”) reverberates through every high-profile racially motivated killing. Writing to Eric Garner, Dyson refers to police as the “blue plague” and “violent enforcers of white supremacy.” In a letter to Breonna Taylor, Dyson examines how Black people stolen from Africa “resisted complete submission to slavery” by faking illness, spoiling crops, and saving their energy during the day to attend dances, worship, and steal food at night. The letter addressed to 15-year-old Chicago murder victim Hadiya Pendleton veers somewhat abruptly into a tangent about cancel culture and the legacy of basketball star Kobe Bryant, but concludes with a cogent call to build a “solid and substantive notion of racial amnesty” for white people “who own up to the fact that they haven’t got this race thing right.” Dyson also provides valuable historical and sociopolitical context in his vivid descriptions of how Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd died. Rich with feeling and insight, this elegiac account hits home. (Dec.)
From the Publisher
”Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, is a brilliant and fiercely eloquent work that traces the roots of racism from slavery and Jim Crow to police brutality and the plague of Black killings in our own day. In gorgeous prose and erudite analysis, Dyson argues that both the trap of white comfort and the peril of cancel culture thwart a genuine reckoning with race in our country. Long Time Coming is a searing cry for racial justice from one of our nation’s greatest thinkers and most compelling prophets.” —Robin DiAngelo, bestselling author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
The manner of George Floyd’s murder—his asphyxiation at the hands of police in the midst of a deadly global respiratory pandemic—appears to have moved some white bystanders to arrive at tough realizations about the realities of white supremacy in the United States. But, author Michael Eric Dyson asks, will this moment actually manifest in meaningful change? This author-narrated audiobook situates our nation’s current white supremacist systems within a larger, and often unacknowledged, historical context of antiblackness. As a narrator, the reverence and tenderness Dyson communicates in his letters—addressed to victims of racist violence Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney—invoke the experience of listening in on a holy epistle. Don’t miss this. G.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-10-08
A scholar of race looks to the future with hope.
In his latest, an apt follow-up to What Truth Sounds Like and Tears We Cannot Stop, Dyson, a Baptist minister, sociology professor, and contributor to the New York Times and the New Republic, offers a sweeping overview of racism in America through the pretext of letters to seven victims of racial violence: Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Cellphone videos have made such violence shockingly public, stoking widespread anguish: George Floyd’s death, in particular, “struck a nerve.” Although Dyson acknowledges that “something feels different,” he asks, “how far are we willing to go? Are we prepared to sacrifice tradition and convention for genuine transformation?” Each letter offers the author an opportunity to expand upon the complexities of Blacks’ experience of hatred and oppression and to offer tempered suggestions for change. In his letter to Garner, for example, Dyson acknowledges that “Black bodies are still an object of scorn and derision” and “of nearly unconscious rage that rattles the cavernous egos of some men who think themselves mighty because they sport a badge and a gun and have referred swagger.” To counter what he calls the “blue plague,” the author proposes reconstructing police administration “so that the chain of command is shared with multiple agencies of safety and protection” as well as “redesign[ing] the architecture of police units and dispers[ing] their duties across a number of agencies while decentralizing both their composition and their authority.” Writing to Pendleton, killed when she was 15, he shares the “righteous anger” her death provoked, but he warns against responding with cancel culture, which he likens to fascism and sees as “a proxy for white supremacy.” In his letter to fellow clergyman Pinckney, Dyson reveals his enduring yet cautious faith in humanity.
A timely, fervent message from an important voice.
