Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

By Michael Eric Dyson

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

This edition includes illustrations by Everett 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.

“Powerfully illuminating, heart-wrenching, and enlightening.” -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, bestselling author of Caste

"Formidable, compelling...has much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward." -Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250276766

Michael Eric Dyson

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON is an author, professor, and broadcaster. He grew up in Detroit, becoming an ordained minister at nineteen and working in factories to support his family. Dyson started college at twenty-one and went on to earn a Ph.D. in religious studies from Princeton University. Currently, Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, host of “The Michael Eric Dyson Show” on NPR, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and contributing editor for the New Republic and ESPN’s website The Undefeated.

Book preview

1. BLACK DEATH

MY DEAR EMMETT TILL,

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The mere mention of your name whisks us to another time and place stained by the blood of martyrs and dripping with the hate of Black bodies. Of all the tragedies of your story—that you were a fourteen-year-old boy from up north who didn’t know the byzantine bigotry of Mississippi, that your stuttering could sometimes be resolved by whistling, that you were kidnapped and killed in such a profane manner—perhaps the saddest is that you never got the chance to do what normal kids do. In a frightening flash you went from Chicago teenager to global icon of the civil rights movement. As important as you have been to my freedom, to our freedom, it would be better to have a world where it didn’t make sense for a beautiful boy like you to have to die. It would be better to live in a country where you could have gone to church, scarfed down hot dogs, flirted with girls, hung out with your friends, talked trash on the basketball court, gotten married and had children, and taken your kids to visit your childhood home while doing what so many of us have done as well: apologize to our mothers for giving them the blues when we were hardheaded

Reviews for Long Time Coming

[villemezbrown · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dyson addresses Black martyrs Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and Rev. Clementa Pinckney in what is basically a series of essays about white supremacy, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Among other things, he also touches on the backlash against the Hamilton musical and the 1619 project, the Gayle King interview that brought up sexual assaults after Kobe Bryant's death, cancel culture, and white comfort.

As with his Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, the writing style feels odd at times on the page, as if intended for oral presentation, as if this were more a transcription of a speech or sermon. The audiobook version may be a better presentation of the material, and I'll probably try his next book in that format.

Still, even on paper, Dyson's voice is compelling. I don't always agree with everything he says this time around -- such as a rationalization for looting during protests -- but I find his arguments powerful and persuasive, and I know I will dwell on them and use them to question my own positions and belief. And if I find myself in the wrong, I take comfort from his emphasis on fallibility, forgiveness and redemption.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There are only so many ways to slice and dice racism. There is the pathetic legal trail, the shameful political trail, tragic straight history, personal memoirs and the legacy of civil rights efforts, to name the top few. Michael Eric Dyson has taken pages from each of them and sewn them into “letters” to Blacks who have been murdered, mostly by whites, in Long Time Coming.

Each chapter is addressed to a different victim: Elijah McLain, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Hadiya Pendleton, and Clementa Pinckney. In the letter (Dear Elijah, etc.), Dyson recaps the way they died to them, and launches into a discourse on some aspect of racism from slavery and Jim Crow lynchings to Black Lives Matter. It’s a different approach, but the content is largely the same. There is no new ground broken here, but the usual sick feeling over 400 years of abuse, physical, mental and sexual, is ever-present.

Early on, in what might be the only really memorable development, Dyson explains the “law of white racist physics”: “A Black body and a white body cannot exist in the same space and same time without white permission.” “Black bodies that violate the rules of play automatically revert back to the conventions of slavery and the protocol of the plantation.” I had not seen that anywhere before.

The hero of the story, if it can be called that, is the cell phone. Dyson does not examine it very closely, but the cellphone has produced real time, definitive, unimpeachable, blow by blow documentation of the murders of ordinary Blacks, out in public. The videos show what are more like executions than arrests. They prove conclusively what Blacks have complained about since Reconstruction: police brutality on top of racial discrimination. Cell phone videos have mobilized whites as nothing ever has before. They have certainly provided much of the story Dyson presents in his book.

I found three complaints buried in the letters. Dyson bemoans the fact that Blacks are not a unified group. They have the same range of opinions and attitudes as anyone else, and do not speak with one voice. It is, of course, unreasonable to think it would ever be otherwise. He also confronts the pickiness whereby whites’ awakening to the continuing discrimination of Blacks might have the effect of reducing the work to cure it, as in the attitude of once it’s out in the open, it is therefore being dealt with. It is not, any more than #metoo has stopped sexual assaults or Congressional hearings have made Facebook a safe place, or listing Trump’s lies has stopped them. Lastly, he does not approve of cancel culture, whereby social media simply avoids mention if not denying the existence of those who offend. What with all the various opinions and attitudes, Dyson most reasonably calls for dealing with structural issues instead of canceling.
The final chapter/letter is addressed to the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was gunned down in his church by Dylan Roof, who hoped to somehow start a race war by doing so. In it, Dyson tells of his own preaching and love of God. He can’t understand how white churches condone all the hate of other races and cultures. But he is full of hope. He sees the possibility of civility and equality, and he clings to it enthusiastically. It is a relief after a litany of crimes against humanity.

David Wineberg