Make it Plain!
Michael Eric Dyson—professor, preacher, and “paid pestâ€â€”brings a critical eye and rhetorical flair to his analyses of hip-hop culture and his call for social justice.Born on October 23, 1958, in Detroit, Michigan, Dyson grew up in a comfortable middle class family. His father was an auto worker, his mother a para-professional in the city schools. In a piece published in Details magazine, Dyson suggested that, due in large part to his age, he was somewhat isolated from the bitter civil rights struggles that occurred in the 1960s. "I was nine years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. died," he said. "I had never heard of him before then. I remember a newscaster interrupted the regular programming and broke the news. My father, sitting in his chair, went ‘Hmph.' A hmph that said both ‘I can't believe it' and ‘How predictable.' That was my initiation into the world of white and black."Dyson was an active youngster and early on he developed his oratorical skills by delivering speeches to the members of the Baptist church he attended. When Dyson was a teenager, a well-meaning neighbor gave him a full set of the Harvard Classics. This standard literature of mostly white European authors may not sound like preferred reading for a black teenager, but Dyson devoured the whole set. "I was reading Two Years before the Mast and also getting my [link to black culture through black musicians like] Smokey Robinson," he joked in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dyson even earned a scholarship to a well-known and respected boarding school in Michigan. Everything seemed to be falling into place for Dyson, but that all changed once he actually arrived at boarding school at the age of 16.At school Dyson first discovered that he had been living a life of segregation. All of the schools and clubs he had ever belonged to had been made up of African Americans, and he had had very little contact with people of other ethnic backgrounds, especially those with white skin. It wasn't long before Dyson began to feel uncomfortable around his classmates, who treated him poorly, often wrecked his dorm room and possessions, and used racial slurs when referring to him. According to Dyson in an America's Intelligence Wire article, "It was very jarring to me, like a sense of Hitchcockian Vertigo." Dyson began to lash out against other students and the boarding school in general, and it was not long before he was expelled.Dyson returned to public high school and graduated in 1976, but by that time he had become a teenage father-to-be and was living off the welfare system. His responsibilities to his yet-unborn child led him to accept a series of jobs in maintenance and auto sales, but he lost his employment just weeks before his son's birth. Dyson also was known on the streets as a hustler and a gang member, and it seemed as if this lifestyle, a style he blamed on racism, was going to be prevalent throughout the rest of his life.
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