The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
by Michael Eric Dyson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael Eric DysonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-12-01
ISBN: 0465017711
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Book Reviews of The Michael Eric Dyson Reader
Book Review: Don Quixote American Style
Summary: 5 Stars
Dyson's book is intellectual fancy footwork at its delicious best. But in the end it too is all but sound and fury about nothing. These very fresh and eclectic essays explain everything but resolve nothing. There is no return address for those responsible for screwing up Western Civilization so badly.
Except for an impassioned appeal to return to Christian love and to expand the paradigm of Christian understanding (most eleganly expressed in his outline of Homoerotic Theology), Dyson's intellectual two-step continues to beg the questions: who is responsible and what is to be done about the moral mess made of America and more generally, Western Civilization?
Dyson is nothing if not an "intellectual devil" busy digging up and kicking up dust in all of the wrong places (the OJ trial, MLK plagialism and womanizing, Black preachers womanizing, ect.) "Braindead America" needs nothing more badly than it needs an intellectual provocatuer like Dyson--a veritable font of new ideas: the man's mind is on fire!
However, it is not enough to go about willy-nilly across the American landscape slaying easy to kill dragons and flailing at easily targetable sacred cows. The real intellectual challenge is to do what Robert Jensen at the University of Texas at Austin has done: Put your intellectual money where your intellectual mouth is: Put that powerful intellect in service to solving problems and into making fundamental changes in this bankrupt American way of life. [Look at New Orleans, for Gods sake?]
It is easy enough, if you are a black intellectual to take the moral highground and rain down sortie-after-sortie upon America's 51st state--the State of Denial--but it is quite another task to admit that had Christianity itself not been sound asleep at the wheel, we might NOW have a very different kind of America.
While whites continue to wallow (scared to death) in their privilege and prerogatives (while Rome burns), black intellectuals like Dyson and Cornel West stay as close to them as possible, ever-jabbing them in the sides hoping that some of the crumbs from the tree of privilege will fall upon them.
This is a hellava way to fight racism, sexism, homophobism, and all other brands of chauvinism but what else can they do? Black intellectuals have the elitist racist "neocons" on one side and the elitist racist "liberals" on the other, and the elitist racist Christians in the middle. They are hemmed-in on all sides. No wonder all they do is flail, Don Quioxite-like at the racist American windmills.
But if they keep flailing, they too will eventually find their footing. Please keep flailing.
Five stars!!
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