Author: Christina LeBlanc
One of America’s premier race scholars, Michael Eric Dyson, came to “reflect upon the state of the culture today” with Occidental students on Tuesday, February 5 as part of the Occidental First Tuesday Speaker program.
Dyson has written 14 books on subjects reaching from Tupac and Bill Cosby to Hurricane Katrina. Having taught at such institutions as Brown, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, Dyson has been named one of the 100 most influential African Americans by Ebony magazine and has appeared on various cable news shows including The O’Reilly Factor, The Colbert Report and the Today Show.
Dyson began his speech by addressing the current state of international affairs under the Bush regime. “There is no question that Saddam Hussein was a thug, but there are many thugs,” he said, indicting the “War on Terror.” Dyson questioned how the United States chooses its battles, particularly foreign policy choices, and criticized the administration’s “imperial gaze” when invading Iraq.
Dyson also questioned why America fought a war abroad when “we’ve got wars on the poor” at home. “How have we gone from the war against poverty, to the war against the poor?” he asked, criticizing the changes in American policy towards poverty. Dyson discussed these internal wars waged on the citizens of this country, and he explored why we often ignore these struggles within our own borders.
Katrina served as Dyson’s primary example of the government’s neglect of American citizens. As author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Dyson discussed the consequences of the post-9/11 reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security to include FEMA. He also explored the consequences of the “good ole boy” cronyism of Bush’s regime. He said that Bush as a person is not someone who doesn’t care, but rather his political policies are at fault. “This nation refused to show up” to the disaster of Katrina, Dyson said.
“It took a rapper, Kanye West, to say that Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Dyson said, further expressing his disgust at the response to Katrina. Dyson dissected the relevance of West’s statement, saying that “we’re not speaking about individual and personal, we’re talking about political and collective.”
Rap music, Dyson explained, can be seen as a method of understanding what he labeled as “the lost generation.” He used the example of Tupac, who said, “Even as a little seed, I could see his plan for me, stranded on welfare, another broken family.” He also used Mos Def’s words, rapping, “you start keeping pace, they start changing up the tempo.”
“Slow down the music and listen to the poetry,” Dyson told the audience. “[Rap music] offers the microphone to people who would never otherwise have gotten to speak.”
In closing, Dyson explored those who often don’t have a voice in society. “What is the fear?” he asked, in reference to gay marriage. “The people who are using the bible [against LGBTQ communities] have no sense of irony because the same thing was done against women and African Americans,” he said. In addition, he criticized both the rap community and society itself, referencing the popularity of the song Soulja Boy and its lyrics “Superman that ‘ho.” “What we do to women is just vicious,” he said.
He personalized this point for his closing statement, saying that he was going to “open up” before he ended his talk. “If you’re a real man, you don’t need to be scared of a strong woman.”
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