What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
Written by Michael Eric Dyson
Narrated by Michael Eric Dyson
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
More praise for What Truth Sounds Like:
"Dyson's passion for the rich African-American cultural tapestry reverberates in this audiobook." — AudioFile Magazine
“What Truth Sounds Like is a tour de force of intellectual history and cultural analysis, a poetically written work that calls on all of us to get back in that room and to resolve the racial crises we confronted more than fifty years ago.” —Harry Belafonte
Michael Eric Dyson
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON—Distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts & Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and NEH Centennial Chair at Vanderbilt University—is one of America’s premier public intellectuals and the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers including Tears We Cannot Stop, What Truth Sounds Like, JAY-Z, and Long Time Coming. A winner of the 2018 nonfiction Southern Book Prize, Dr. Dyson is also a recipient of two NAACP Image awards and the 2020 Langston Hughes Festival Medallion. Former president Barack Obama has noted: “Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.”
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Reviews for What Truth Sounds Like
35 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Amazing read.Great references and outstanding passion. Must Read Now. Relevant
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5It's hard to read anything by Dyson after seeing the way he embarrassed himself in the Munk debates. He's less of a scholar than a street preacher or itinerant preacher. His arguments rely on unreflectively insisting on the moral perfection of progressive ideology, and then assuming that nothing is ever progressive enough, every instance of non-conformity to progressive orthodoxy is as bad as Jim Crow, and excommunication is the best way to remove any and all voices of opposition, dissent, or even mild objection. He is part of reason liberals are losing the battle to Leftists, and why the Democratic Party is no longer the party that seeks to smooth the rough edges of capitalism and ensure fairness for all in our melting pot culture by using reason, data, and Intellectual honesty. It is becoming a safe space for virtue-signaling lemmings who are oblivious to their frightening similarity to Mao's Red Guard. Dyson is their Speer.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Was a deep book, but was really good and informative.