Come Hell or High Water by Michael Eric Dyson

A Message from Michael Eric Dyson

Over the last fifteen years, I have had the extraordinary privilege to be an academic and a public intellectual—an engaged and politically active scholar devoted to changing the world as best I can with the gifts at hand. I was the first person in my family to have the opportunity to pursue higher education and to live the life of the mind. For ten years now, I have had a Ph.D. I believe that obligates me, as a member of a historically oppressed group, to pursue social justice for those who have been closed away from school doors and the halls of economic opportunity for far too long. But my privilege also summons me to think sharply and substantively about a wide range of intellectual issues, and to address the social and moral crises of the culture. I have never, not for even a second, believed that one couldn't at the same time be smart and good, informed and involved, thoughtful and active. They are for me flip sides of the same vocational coin.

For the last twenty-five years, I have had the high honor to be called "Reverend Dyson." I found my calling in a black Baptist church in Detroit whose ministry prized intellectual preparation as the hallmark of faithful service. Although tough circumstances meant that I didn't enroll in college until I was twenty-one, I learned very early-from my mother, Addie Mae; from my Sunday School instructors at church; and from my public school teachers—that education is the doorway to life and liberty. In my case, it was as well a path to a sense of ministry that embraces the head and heart. Even though I haven't been a parish minister for twenty years now, I consider my role as an engaged intellectual the extension of my calling to "preach the gospel to the poor," and to "heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised."

Since my second year of graduate school, I have written professionally for a wide range of academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers. During the last decade, I have also published eight books—some with scholars in mind, others aimed at a literate general public—all with the intent of reflecting on important and interesting topics in the life of the mind, the life of the soul, the life of the race, and the life of the nation. Because of my writing, I have lectured at universities and in union halls; held forth in junior colleges and in juvenile detention centers; preached in churches and in synagogues, temples, and mosques; addressed civil rights groups and professional gatherings; spoken to public and private grade schools, middle schools, and high schools; engaged adults and adolescents in jails and prisons across America; and traveled over water to deliver talks in Italy and Brazil, in Amsterdam and in Cuba, and in Jamaica and the Bahamas. It is also because of my writing that I have appeared across the mediascape on radio and television programs throughout the land—and in cyberspace—to debate current affairs and pressing social issues, and to hold up the banner of progressive politics. In my mind, writing is thinking, struggling, fighting, imagining, loving, hoping, preaching, crying, wishing, and inspiring, all at once.

This book charts the geography of my intellectual journey. It maps the regions of my intellectual interests—religion and philosophy, race theory and rap music, masculinity and multiculturalism, feminist thought and gender relations, black identity and popular culture, moral thought and sexuality, cultural criticism and critical theory, intellectual life and institutional racism, soul music and jazz history, black film and postmodernism, and a great deal besides. This reader is a diagram as well of the intellectual and rhetorical treasures I have mined over the years and a record of the struggles I have waged to understand better, to think deeper, and to write clearer about matters of life and death. What guides all of my thought and action is the belief that human beings who think creatively and act boldly can shape history and relieve suffering for the good of the neighborhood and the planet. I hope you, the reader, enjoy this reader, and journey with me through the intellectual and political wilderness of our international life in the hopes of finding a city of moral beauty and justice for all.