Introduction by Imani Perry

There is no debate on this: Michael Eric Dyson is riveting. And alongside his oratorical magic is a great depth of intellect and commitment. In his example, we see how the proverbial “fire in the bones” blazes even brighter when stoked with knowledge. This collection of debates that the reverend scholar has participated in for more than a decade displays the arc of his insightful commentaries and conversations with a diverse and impressive group of fellow public figures.

“Public intellectual,” unfortunately, has become a hackneyed title. Some professional academics derisively take it to mean someone who spends a lot of time on television rather than writing books or doing research. The general public, on the other hand, often takes it to mean someone who is so smart that we just love to hear him or her talk, even if we don’t actually listen to what that person is saying. Michael Eric Dyson, however, is a public intellectual in the best sense of the word. He is a serious writer and scholar, and yet he consistently shares his message beyond the ivory tower. The world listens because he doesn’t speak from some high gilded perch. He gets down into the nitty-gritty of life with the rest of us, at once an adored teacher and an everyman.

Michael Eric Dyson, sometimes called a “hip hop scholar” due to his urban poetics and because, as they say in the hood, he “knows what time it is,” is the author of more than a dozen books on a range of subjects. This volume, however, is a rare gift. It allows readers to re-visit many of his most important live exchanges over social issues with other leading thinkers, politicians, pundits, and policy makers. It is also somewhat reminiscent of another literary tradition: published sermons. In the history of African American letters, the sermon is both an oral and textual art. The homilist has a live moment, but the very best sermons are often transcribed or taped, and become cherished artifacts that we return to for spiritual sustenance. It is no accident that Dyson, so rooted in this tradition, would understand the usefulness of sharing debate and dialogue in written form. Whether we agree or disagree with Professor Dyson on a given issue, these newly published debates give us something to hold onto beyond the television or radio moment and the opportunity to share those live exchanges with an even wider audience. These debates provide vehicles for reflection and conversation in our daily lives.

The role of the public intellectual is an essential one in times of change, conflict, political confusion, war, and suffering. We need global scholar-citizens to weigh in, to help us make sense of it all. But more than that, we need people who are willing to enter the fray and speak to what is good, humane, and just. Enter Dr. Dyson. He keeps his rhetorical finger on the pulse of our world.

The book is also in a sense a cultural history of the past decade and a half, and is thus a record of the many social challenges we have faced and continue to struggle with. A number of the earlier debates shared here are prescient of issues that have since grown to greater prominence and puzzlement—from the politics of immigration to what the New York Times refers to as the “crisis of black men.” Hence, this is not just a text version of a public intellectual holding forth. It is a document of a public engagement, in which Dyson shines but also, at times, steps back and becomes simply part of the fabric of the conversation.

In the twenty-first century, academics are increasingly in the public eye. But they are often trotted out only as objective experts on specific details and don’t offer moral, ethical, or critical assessments of the issues at hand. Michael Eric Dyson, who arrived as the junior star in the early ’90s rise of the black public intellectual, a movement that served to revive the intellectual life of Americans generally, doesn’t exist in the narrow box that academic-pundits of today are so often placed. He argues positions as well as facts. Especially important, in this book he doesn’t stand alone. This work shows him as part of a community of thinkers. In that way, the life revealed in this book might remind those who are familiar with black history of early twentieth century African American “race men and women” who spent their lives thinking, talking, and acting to address the race problem. For them, as with Dyson, talk was neither cheap nor superfluous.

The impressive array of figures with whom Dyson debates is matched by the venues in which the debates occur: on the outlets helmed by well-respected broadcast journalists such as Mara Tapp, Tavis Smiley, and Juan Williams, in mass media arenas such as the Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher shows, and in the halls of academe and on the airwaves of NPR.

In these debates, Dyson speaks with people all across the political spectrum; with a diverse body of professionals: academics, commentators, policy makers, and entertainers; and with a multiracial, multigendered group who represent multiple constituencies. The diversity of the conversations is not just about who they include, who they are in front of, and where they take place, but also in the formats. Some are interviews, others are round tables, and still others are adversarial. Each has its own distinct way of showing how critical subjects can be explored.

Although the chapters are thematically arranged, several important ideas cut across all the sections. One is this: Although this book is titled “Debating Race,” race in the contemporary world is about much more than the color of one’s skin. It is deeply tied to ethnicity, power, class, culture, gender roles, belief systems, institutions, and identity. Hence, debating race is also about debating all these as well as other issues. One cannot speak of race in two-dimensional terms any longer.

Another theme that emerges is the value of the Socratic ideal of learning through conversation. These are not a bunch of public figures standing on soapboxes; these are true conversations.

And a third important, but perhaps more subtle, idea that comes through in this book is that despite the fact of media consolidation, such that now multimedia company ownership is held in a few hands (a phenomenon which has been a cause for alarm in many democratically minded people), and despite the dumbing down of our television and print news media, our media worlds continue to have spaces in which people can address important and complicated issues.

In this book, you’ll witness Dyson’s measured responses to deeply challenging questions about many events and issues. And it soon becomes clear that although he debates and strongly identifies as a political progressive, he is not stuck in a simplistic or calcified position on anything, nor does he have a knee-jerk reaction to even the most rattling challenges. He takes all ideas seriously, weighs their merits and their limitations, and then illuminates.

Like his many audiences, the reader of this volume will be struck by Dyson’s disregard for what or who is considered highbrow or lowbrow. Nothing is too high to be subject to critique, nothing is too low for it not to be taken seriously. He can talk with the same rigor about daytime TV and the philosophy of Martin Buber. There is philosophy, cultural criticism, and good old opinion in these pages. He’ll call George Bush out, to his face, and Bill Cosby too. In the words of the hood, “If you don’t know, you better ask somebody.” In particular, the ongoing face-off between Dyson and Cosby is a public vetting of an ideological conflict over how black people should be seen and see themselves that promises to be of historic importance. President Bush, on the other hand, was rendered to sputtering frustration by Dyson. (When news anchor Brian Williams, in an interview with the president, cited Dyson’s characterization of Bush as a “clueless patrician” on Williams’s program the previous day, Bush could only manage, “Dyson doesn’t know … I don’t know Dyson, and Dyson doesn’t know me … the Professor Dysons of the world say things …”)

But Dyson treats even his heroes with rigor and skepticism. When he talks about Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, and brings up King’s infidelity and his “sampling” of others’ words, it is a risky road but one taken because Dyson has such a deep love for King despite, or even perhaps in part because of, his human fallibility and frailty.

Because Dr. Dyson rejects treating highbrow and lowbrow subjects with different standards, and because he refuses to think high-status people are immune to critique when it comes to their personal failings, he answers questions with a broader collection of evidence than that generally drawn on by other public intellectuals. For example, in his debate with Shelby Steele, in which the theme of black responsibility for social ills is at issue, Dyson talks about the ubiquitous Sunday morning and sidewalk talk in African American communities in which responsibility is a key cultural tenet, not a flouted social norm. Evidence comes from many quarters.

Although some of these debates were, and still are, hot topics, others are far less likely to garner headlines, although they are no less prescient. The nuanced discussion of black and Latino relations in chapter 5 is one essential example of Dyson’s dedication to talk about what matters, even if we don’t yet know its importance.

The seriousness with which he takes the range of his subjects is tempered by a good-natured embrace of ideas, a sense of humor, and a love for all the people in his earshot, who he pushes to think hard but never looks down on. We may not understand every word he says, but he isn’t saying them so that we don’t understand. He’s telling us to go to the dictionary. And unlike his other texts, which originated as (elegantly) written documents, the laughter, timing, and grace that are signature features of his oral style jump off the page.

There are conflicts here; some are clearly beefs and others are gentle disagreements. For example, in chapter 15, there appears to be no love lost between Dyson and Joe Klein in their discussion of the Million Man March (or between Dyson and Shelby Steele or Mary Matalin, for that matter, in other chapters). He takes his opponents on in a dignified but incisive fashion. You get the sense that Dyson never thinks about how to stay out of trouble. He meets it head-on. On the other hand, he doesn’t attack—he dissects. That’s how we know he’s not just stubborn when he clashes with ideological opposites; he’s on a mission. Part of why so many people in his audiences trust and appreciate him is because he is willing to take unpopular positions. He uses his platform not to be shock jock but to be a “holler scholar” who is both loud and righteous.

On the other hand, some chapters are conversations with like-minded thinkers. These read somewhat like exchanges behind the walls of a think tank or a literary salon, where all involved parties are trying to develop a deeper understanding. Some of the most beautiful exchanges are with Dr. Dyson’s intellectual peers and friends, such as in chapter 6, where he sits with others (the lone African American) to talk about whiteness and white identity, or in chapter 10, where he talks to Cornel West, a Princeton professor similarly rooted in the black theological tradition and Western philosophy. In these debates you see amongst all the participants a heartfelt desire to serve humanity.

Likewise, his engagements with politicians are responses to the call to serve. Chapter 14, an excerpt from his Senate testimony in 2000 about youth and violence, is a nuanced rendering of the relationship between rap music, deindustrialization, and the effects of capital and inequality. Meaningfully, he testified in an effort to affect the positions of elected officials, not merely to assert his own. When he talks about contemporary basketball and Latrell Sprewell (chapter 16), you see the same drive to edify us and to help us understand the vulnerability and complexity of black public figures and popular culture.

The great variety of the chapters reminds us of the real point of debate. It is not sensationalism or aggression; it is a way of sharing and arguing many points of view and many aspects of an idea. Debating Race is just such a rhetorical and expository delivery of thought.

This volume may help readers garner a deeper understanding of Dyson the public intellectual. Critics will be hard-pressed to claim that his public persona is too much flash, or pomp and circumstance. Read the debates. They are without exception examples of thoughtful interventions on important issues. They are alternately humble, full of bravado, emotional, even personal, but never egotistical or empty.

This is but a small fraction of the debates in which Dr. Dyson has engaged. For mention of Dyson’s future public debates and examples of his recorded or transcribed debates not included here, look on his Web site, Michaelericdyson.com.

Readers who are familiar with Dyson the public figure but not Dyson the scholar will find this volume a useful introduction to many of his other works, especially Come Hell or High Water, written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has Middle Class Black America Lost Its Mind?; I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.; Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur; and Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism.

 In sum, Professor Dyson guides a public, which is sometimes terribly anti-intellectual, to want to learn, think, and understand. I know that readers will appreciate being able to return to the debates again and again, and to have the time to look up his many and diverse references. Dyson is not a bourgeois intellectual (he rejects bourgie affectations), nor is he an organic intellectual (he has formal training). Instead, he is a sincere, from-the-gut intellectual. And I am honored to introduce this volume, in which he shares that sincerity and passion with the world.