good evening from los angeles, i'm tavis smiley. tonight a conversation with professor and author michael eric dyson. dyson is just out with a new text appealing to white america. politics are reaching new heights. he's calling for a deeper understanding. we're glad you've joined us. a conversation with michael eric dyson. a sermon to white america in just a moment.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. i'm pleased to welcome michael eric dyson back to the program. he's a best selling author, political commentator. and he is foremost a baptist preacher. his latest text, he reflects that, tears we cannot stop. a sermon to white america. and i was coming home from washington the other day, and

eight on the list. >> hallelujah. >> premiered at number eight. >> yeah, well, you know -- >> and you know, you live on those terms, i'm just visiting, i'm glad -- i said, this is what tavis feels like. our reunion is like bbd coming back together with bobby brown. >> let's make some music then. >> let's make some music. >> part of what makes you so pleased about that, was the fact that i knew the text had to say. in a moment like this, it was almost like a bomb to me. that -- because you don't get on the list at number eight with just negroes buying your book. the fact that white people were

open to hearing a sermon to them that put you on the list, that's like a bomb for me. >> that's a bauerful point you're making, most people missed that. i was in atlanta doing a book signing. a white woman came up to me and said, thank you for trusting us, for telling us the truth. thank you for trusting us enough to tell us the truth. that struck me. we were nervous, what are we going to do, how are we going to do it. i tried to write every other thing. i wrote an essay, it didn't work. one night, you'll get this, i said, lord, what am i going to do, these people done paid me this money. >> and the good white folk want their stuff. >> and they want it back, and i spent it. >> i cannot go in the corner no more. do what you've always done, preach. and in the midnight hour. there's some strange things can happen at midnight. the inspiration came to me, and

i got up that night, and i wrote, and it poured out of me, what is now you see the opening, the invocation, that poured out of me, and i sent it to my editor, they said, oh, my god, here it is, i knew that i wanted to share with white brothers and sisters out of my heart, which is why i called them beloved. i know a lot of white people say, why do you call them beloved? because i'm a preacher, that's what we do. i wand to demand something of them. normally when we speak of race in america we're talking about black folk, brown folk. white folk don't even think about themselves as a race. men don't think of gender, we're men. i wanted to invite white americans into a conversation that was very tough, i wanted to give some historical backdrop to to understand how we think about is rah, whiteness and what we can do to solve this racial

dilem dilemma. >> when i saw the book come across my desk, i loved that title. they would rather see a sermon than hear one. if theyen cat see the sermon, if he can't feel the sermon when they see it, when they see trayvon getting shot. you know where i'm going with this? >> yes. >> how are they going to hear it? >> how shall they hear it without a preacher. i don't want to step in in a self-serving fashion, that's what preachers do, make the connections with people who see one thing understand that it's problematic, but don't know quite how to read it, how to interpret it, what i wanted to do was to bringing together the flesh of their experience with the bone and marrow of their intuition, and i wanted to be that interlocking force to say, let me tell you what's going on here, when we get gunned down and mowed down, that's your

child, you don't think about it as your child. you put yourself in our shoes, you would. let me tell you stories about my son, my daughter, my other son how we've suffered. getting humiliated. many white people read that and go, wait a minute. he's reasonable on this. and let's not put ourselves in that position. to your point, i was trying to show them in the sermonic treatment, this is the -- these are the stakes of black people in america, this is the hurt and pain we suffer, you can't damn us. you can't say, you must not have been acting right, talking right. as if we could behave our way out of unconscious white supremacy. i wanted to challenge some of that stuff, by preaching about it, talking about it, by exposing the murt and the pain and the trauma, and the grief, i think that white people have identified with it, and hopefully will continue to.

>> the other thing i thought, you can't ever go wrong preaching to black folk. there's something that some white folk do from time to time do to belittle the black church or the black preacher. he's either a poverty pimp or -- >> sure. >> when people want to take a swipe at the black community. all you got is churches and preachers. maybe a few singers. the notion of preaching can be -- people look at it in a reductionist sort of way. you close that as your frame anyway. i was surprised knowing who you are. it was risky. >> i know and you know, the genius of our tradition, i know there are black men and women standing up at pulpits every sunday, have 12 people in their church that can outpreach any great retorition.

our previous president, his rhetorical majesty. on a 12 member church on the corner, tonight i want to preach about god is love, i don't want to talk about god, i don't want to talk about love. that negro will work with is and preach it. >> and then you -- you don't know if you have emmanuel or jay z. the reality of that genius, i knew it. frederick douglass, lance watson, rudolph mckissick. i can name them. if they knew the talent that these people possess. what i wanted to do was translate the extraordinary capacity to preach, i'm a practitioner, but when i hear them preach, i want to give my license back. i wanted to combine that with what i knew to be the ability of

the black pull pet to speak directly to white america. >> martin luther king jr., i wanted to harkin back to what dr. king was doing, and dig deep into black rhetoric and say, this is what we want to give you, i'm a scholar, i got a ph.d. but i wanted to go back -- old people said i had my burnin' before i had my learnin'. how do we give an adequate picture. i knew that preaching was the basis of it. paul tillic said, i reserve one arrogance, when it comes to theology, germans have it. when it comes to preachin', we killing that name. you all do something else, do scooby doo or something, we're killing the american preaching. >> yet there's a fine line -- you don't want to be guilty of

preaching in a way where you misconnect humanity. >> exactly. >> how do you get to the humanity, which is the only part of them you touch. >> that's a brilliant point, tavis. there are at least two different traditions. absolutist, thundering down from the pulpit or getting down on the ground with the people. sing from the gaze of god. we're down here on the ground. in the trenches, i remember the late great william augustus jones. it was said he had a voice like gods only deeper. he told me once, young man, i used to thunder down from the pulpit. i now preach more about grace, maybe because i need more of it. i'm down here with the people in the trenches, trying to talk

about the possibility. i'm going to approach these white brothers and sisters, i'm going to love the hell out of you. i'm not trying to proselytize you. i'm trying to convert your understanding into something useful to your life and give it to you from our perspective, see it from somebody else's perspective, walk another mile in our shoes, but see it through our spec tackles. our job is to give you a different set of lenses. you go to the optometrist. you start saying what you see. okay, jesus said, what do you see. i see men as trees walking. let me go back to that, that miracle didn't take p.m. ip trying to give a different spec tackal, a different lens on the suffering that's there, not from the sense that i possess the only one. the one i possess, i know has been sharpened by the ecstasies and agonies of my own existence. i teach at the well known black

school called georgetown. historically black colleges and universities, i teach white folk every day. i get hate mail from these white people. i know that intimately. the mistake white people made they put us behind them. we had to know them for our survival. white brothers and sisters ain't had to know us for their survival. are they crazy, mad, going to give us a raise. how do we talk to them? how do we speak to them. i wanted to use all that folk wisdom and alie that with whatever insight i've been able to generate over 30 years of teaching. you. >> use the word love. i want to come back to that much whether or not in this moment wraej love is enough. we can have a whole conversation about the great notion about love and what happened in our public discourse. you can do a seminar at georgetown about that. is love enough in this moment?

>> absolutely. because we haven't tried it. you know, somebody said, it's not that christianity has failed, we've never tried it. love has never been a thing the way dr. king talked about it. agape is a demanding love, love at that level, i've often said that justices would love sounds like what it speaks like in public. justice is the translation of love. love doesn't mean i feel good about you, i want to invest myself in the creative activity of transforming this culture, that may mean we have to alter circumstances, justice is the public face, the public voice of love, when we demand that real love be done, that's the kind of thing king was killed for. people thought king got killed for a variety of reasons. he was so thorough in the demand that love be placed at the heart of american culture, the unloving forces of this society

resisted him, and in that sense, i think that love is the ultimate demand. it's the ultimate means by which we can articulate a vision that we will counter what we see going on today. when you hear the public discourse today, the nastiness, the venom, the hatefulness, and people have all kinds of reasons. we lost our comety, the sense of possessing the humanity of the other forever as we think about them. what we lost is love. what our mamas and daddy's knew, i know what those people were reared on and what they gave us, will transform this nation, we've never tried it, that's why i quote howard thurmond in there, never reduce your dreams to the ehaven't you confront right now. if you reduce it to now. you lose the horizon of possibility. that kind of love that black people have been reared on, i mean, look at it this way, i tell white brothers and sisters, we could have turned the al qaeda way, we could have tried to stab you, shoot you, murder you, poison your water stream,

but we love you, and in loving you, we preserve the fab of the society we sought to trans form, hate will undermine the very institution it wants to inhabit. >> if i take your quote, and it's a powerful one that justice is what love looks like in public. i buy that, and i -- >> what it sounds like when it speaks in public. >> if that is the case, it sounds to me like you can't have justice without love? >> that's right. that's right. >> that puts a particular burden on white people? >> it does. we got to share some of this. black, brown, red, yellow people, we're born to burden they always ask me, what does it feel like to be a problem. he said, it's a strange thing to always be measured by somebody else's standards and be seen through somebody else's lens. white brothers and sisters have to come out the closet of race. they think they are often collectively neutral. that's why i approached them the

way i did. why can't you people stop being obsessed with race not knowing they're speaking from a privilege to allow their race to be rendered invisible many if we had that privilege, your race is invisible, therefore whiteness is universal, neutral, american, human. white brothers and sisters say why can't you be human like me. why can't you allow me to be human. the first thing to do is to unmask privilege. you know what, you've got more money than me, and you're a rich professor at georgetown, my kids don't have privileges. what kind of privilege do i have. you walk down the street, a policeman stops you, you have an encounter, you live to tell about it. you don't have to have any money in the bank. you have the white skin that e presents you wiggle room.

i'm at ben's chilly bowl about 1:30 in the morning. the white kid is cussing the police out like he's making a richard pryor movie. what the police said, son, you're clearly inebriated you need to go home. i said, jesus, that's what we need, that's all we want. >> that's the first time that's happened on u street. >> yeah, come on. because negro would have been like, son, get the lead out your behind, it will be filled. >> i didn't want to lose this, you mentioned frederick douglass haynes made me think of frederick douglass. >> he's doing real well. i mean, you know what, i think he's playing second base for the baltimore orioles. >> his numbers are looking good.

>> crazy. >> oh, my god. he's playing in the bush league. >> what did you make of the president the other day, acting as if frederick douglas was still living. >> let me defend this brother before i deconstruct it. the beauty of what donald trump does, is to act as if an iconic figure extracted from history is sitting right next to him. you have to give him love for the recognition that this is living history to me now. had he known who he was, it would have been great. the thing is, this bespeaks the level of mediocrity that has besieged us. not knowing black folk -- his life has never depended -- the art of the deal doesn't depend on knowing frederick douglass. the tragedy with our president is that he's not been pushed to know, and that tavis, you and i both know, that affirmative

action doesn't mean what a lot of people think it mean. let's take that definition for a minute, how can you not say, that this administration is the very living embodiment of the worst conception of affirmative action. you got a bunch of billionaires. just because you have dough doesn't mean you know what you're doing. they're incapable of understanding the fundamental principles of the united states of america. >> and been confirmed. >> and including the beloved detroiter, dr. ben carson. as i said, the soft bigotry of expectations. that's real progress, when a mediocre black person can get there as well. he's been known to separate twins, can he separate himself from that madness. the reality is, this is an

administration that doesn't feel compelled to know, hasn't been made to know. let's be honest, white supremacy and whiteness itself is the ultimate fake news. the stories you've told each other, i'm trying to say, tell the truth. finally they get it with donald trump. i didn't write this book with donald trump in mind. i think he's the literal face of white innocence, white power, the inability to take seriously one own's privilege, and to ask a person of such stature to think about it is an extremely difficult but not impossible job. i think many white brothers and sisters looking at him go, i finally get it many as i say, frankenstein is the name of the doctor not the monster, the monster was created by a system, paul ryan, eric cantor, john boehner. it led to the creation of this monster, he turns around and

bites them. they say, it's a problem. i think it was a problem when you created him. donald trump represents that. >> what do you make of the data that suggest we not only didn't gain ground on race during the obama era. but we lost ground in the obama e era. >> i actually talk about that in one of my books. i strike to strike a balance of critique and praise. the reason it was difficult for many black people to really oppose donald trump at a certain level, even as you've often stead, a broke clock can be right twice a day. he was making some legitimate points about the loss of black people under the first black presidency, we look at it across the board, every index suggests

we had a double rate of unemployment. if that had been a white man in the white house, we would have been outside picketing. we know that president obama was in an extremely difficult position, the moment he talked about race, they went ham. i tell people, that's true. but they went ham about anything he mentioned. if he talked about isis, they went ham. if you know they're going to come at you regardless or irregardless. then what you need to do is understand, stake out your position. i'm going to say something here, i think that -- ironically, and paradoxically, in a bitter sense, that the presence of obama drove the rise of a figure like a donald trump, first there was the resentment of this black man in charge, and as a result of that, white resentment was deeply embittered, there was also a win in which the president failed to challenge the way he could. white brothers and sisters.

i don't mean rafiki go out there with a black panther speer. i'm saying, there is no easy equivalence between black anger in the '60s and your anger for having to do the right thing now. he failed to challenge white brothers and sisters. >> would you call trump a referendum on obama? >> no question about that, it's a referendum on obama, a reaction against obama and vengeance to have three yards as a preacher. >> you have to have three. >> we got to do it. >> the father, son and the holy ghost. >> how do you sustain your hope given what's in this text and what we're going-forwa through? >> i take howard thurmond seriously, the heat, the raw hide whip of the overseer. if our mothers and fathers could have imagined a different future, didn't know what a dangling participle was.

but they understood who god was, i have to have enough humility to say let me genuflect at the alter of what they've gone through. i didn't care bears and lions, i can handle this giant over here. donald trump is bad, but he ain't the baddest man, the baddest thing we've confronted. let's stop -- like snl, it's the worst ever, jiminy cricket ever. and they go yeah, okay. this ain't it, y'all. what we have to do, we have to help our white brothers and sisters, let me tell you some other points in history. frederick douglass ain't a second baseman for the baltimore orioles. but actually said some stuff that could inform policy and transform donald trump. it would be a heck of a thing to see him engaging the black

history he easily spouts. >> and to this sermon the church said. >> amen. the book is called "tears we cannot stop" a sermon to white america. just hit the new york times bestseller list. only mike dyson can get blurbs from toni morrison and steven king. i wanted to add that. >> i did say beloved, but it is a horror show. >> thanks for watching, as always, keep the faith. for more information on today's show, visit tavissmiley@pbs.org. join me next time for a conversation with bascar sancar. that's next time.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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