Audiobooks narrated by Michael Eric Dyson

Renowned, bestselling author Michael Eric Dyson makes his YA debut, with critically acclaimed author Marc Favreau, to deliver an urgent, enlightening account of racial inequality in America. The true story of racial inequality-and resistance to it-is the prologue to our present. You can see it in where we live, where we go to school, where we work, in our laws, and in our leadership. Unequal presents a gripping account of the struggles that shaped America and the insidiousness of racism, and demonstrates how inequality persists. As readers meet some of the many African American people who dared to fight for a more equal future, they will also discover a framework for addressing racial injustice in their own lives.

Marc Favreau, Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

This program is read by the author From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop For more than thirty years, Michael Eric Dyson has played a prominent role in the nation as a public intellectual, university professor, cultural critic, social activist and ordained Baptist minister. He has presented a rich and resourceful set of ideas about American history and culture. Now for the first time he brings together the various components of his multihued identity and eclectic pursuits. Entertaining Race is a testament to Dyson’s consistent celebration of the outsized impact of African American culture and politics on this country. Black people were forced to entertain white people in slavery, have been forced to entertain the idea of race from the start, and must find entertaining ways to make race an object of national conversation. Dyson’s career embodies these and other ways of performing Blackness, and in these pages, he entertains race with his pen, voice and body, and occasionally, alongside luminaries like Cornel West, David Blight, Ibram X. Kendi, Master P, MC Lyte, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alicia Garza, John McWhorter, and Jordan Peterson. Most of this work will be new to listeners, a fresh light for many of his long-time fans and an inspiring introduction for newcomers. Entertaining Race offers a compelling vision from the mind and heart of one of America’s most important and enduring voices. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press 'Entertaining Race is a splendid way to spend quality time reading one of the most remarkable thinkers in America today.' —Speaker Nancy Pelosi 'To read Entertaining Race is to encounter the life-long vocation of a teacher who preaches, a preacher who teaches and an activist who cannot rest until all are set free.' —Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Dear Emmett Till: An Excerpt from Long Time Coming

A letter to Emmett Till, an excerpt from Dyson's longer work, Long Time Coming Here is a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. As Dyson notes: 'Rarely has the tragic fact of Black death been as urgently in need of interpretation and engagement as in this moment.'

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

'As a narrator, the reverence and tenderness Dyson communicates in his letters--addressed to victims of racist violence Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney--invoke the experience of listening in on a holy epistle. Don't miss this.' -- AudioFile Magazine This program is read by Michael Eric Dyson. From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night’s events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation’s history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd’s death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg. Long Time Coming grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five beautifully argued chapters—each addressed to a black martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney—Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life—and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson’s exciting new book points the way to social redemption. Long Time Coming is a necessary guide to help America finally reckon with race. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press “Antiracist demonstrations have been like love notes to the martyrs of racist terror and anti-Blackness. Michael Eric Dyson writes out these love notes in this powerfully illuminating, heart-wrenching, and enlightening book. Long Time Coming is right on time.” —Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist “Crushingly powerful, Long Time Coming is an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents 'Michael Eric Dyson is one of the nation’s most thoughtful and critical thinkers in social inequality and the demands of justice. Long Time Coming, his latest formidable, compelling book, has much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward.' —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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JAY-Z: Made in America

This program is read by the author, and includes an introduction written by Pharrell, and read by Nick Cannon. 'Dyson's incisive analysis of JAY-Z's brilliance not only offers a brief history of hip-hop's critical place in American culture, but also hints at how we can best move forward.' -Questlove JAY-Z: Made in America is the fruit of Michael Eric Dyson's decade of teaching the work of one of the greatest poets this nation has produced, as gifted a wordsmith as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Rita Dove. But as a rapper, he's sometimes not given the credit he deserves for just how great an artist he's been for so long. This audiobook wrestles with the biggest themes of JAY-Z's career, including hustling, and it recognizes the way that he's always weaved politics into his music, making important statements about race, criminal justice, black wealth and social injustice. As he enters his fifties, and to mark his thirty years as a recording artist, this is the perfect time to take a look at JAY-Z's career and his role in making this nation what it is today. In many ways, this is JAY-Z's America as much as it's Pelosi's America, or Trump's America, or Martin Luther King's America. JAY-Z has given this country a language to think with and words to live by.

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson, Nick Cannon (Narrator)

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What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race

This program is read by the author. What Truth Sounds Like is a timely exploration of America's tortured racial politics that continues the conversation from Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop. President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison." In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: "What in your heart has changed that's going to change the direction of this country?" "I don't believe you just change hearts," she protested. "I believe you change laws." The fraught conflict between conscience and politics - between morality and power - in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes. In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence. Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry - that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics, and that they weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy's anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. "I guess if I were in his shoes...I might feel differently about this country." Kennedy set about changing policy - the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways. There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he'd never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys' efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy - versus the racial experience of Baldwin - is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change. What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

This program is read by the author. In the wake of yet another set of police killings of black men, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a tell-it-straight, no holds barred piece for the NYT last Sunday July 7: "Death in Black and White" (It was updated within a day to acknowledge the killing of police officers in Dallas). The response has been overwhelming. Beyonc e and Isabel Wilkerson tweeted it, JJ Abrams, among many other prominent people, wrote him a long fan letter. The NYT closed the comments section after 2,500 responses, and Dyson has been on NPR, BBC, and CNN non-stop since then. Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause, "Nothing." Dyson believes he was wrong. In TOUGH LOVE, he responds to that question. If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. As Dyson writes "At birth you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead...The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know...You think we have been handed everything because we fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace should be yours first and foremost, and if there's anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully." In the tradition of THE FIRE NEXT TIME (Baldwin), short, emotional, literary, powerful, this is the audiobook that ALL Americans who care about the current and long burning crisis in race relations need to listen to.

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line

As a former welfare father who is also an ordained Baptist minister and a Princeton Ph.D., Michael Eric Dyson is one of those rare intellectuals who act not only as interpreters between black and white America but as bridges between the academy and the street. In this brave, bracing, and vastly readable book, he identifies the hidden rules that govern interactions between the races and within black communities, poisoning our language, our politics, and our thinking. From the O. J. Simpson trial to the generational politics of gangsta rap, and from Colin Powell to Louis Farrakhan, Dyson takes on the most contentious issues of the 1990s. Again and again he shows us that, in a society that prides itself on being color-blind, race is more important-and more pernicious-than ever. Filled with eloquence and erudition, wit and moral common sense, Race Rules is an invaluable guide to the America we really live in as well as a redemptive vision of the one we want for our children.

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr's Death and the Transformation of America

On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 P.M., while he was standing on a balcony at a Memphis hotel, Martin Luther King Jr. Was shot and fatally wounded. Only hours earlier King-the prophet for racial and economic justice in America-ended his final public speech by saying, "I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land." Acclaimed public intellectual and best-selling author, Michael Eric Dyson uses the fortieth anniversary of King's assassination as a starting point for a comprehensive reevaluation of the fate of America, specifically Black America, over the ensuing years. Dyson ambitiously, and controversially, investigates the ways in which we as a people have made it to the Promised Land that King spoke of and shines a bright light on the many areas that we still have a long way to go. Rather than only looking back, April 4, 1968 takes a sweeping 360-degree view of King's death-remembering all the toil, triumph, and tribulation that led to that fateful date while anticipating the ways in which the legacy of King's death will affect the future of this country. "Such is the genius of Dyson. He flows freely from the profound to the profane, from popular culture to classical literature."-Washington Post

Michael Eric Dyson (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Michael Eric Dyson