Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Of a piece with What Truth Sounds Like and Tears We Cannot Stop, Michael Eric Dyson’s elegiac, aching, epistolary history of racial violence in America is a “love letter to the martyrs of the struggle, to my people who have been courageous long-distance runners in the fight for justice, and to a country that hasn’t always loved us as it should.” In seven sharp, exquisite missives to those killed, Dyson wrestles with their deaths, invites us to confront past and present, challenges us to truly look at the legacy of race. In the confrontation we might find a better future.

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER and NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE

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, bestselling 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250276759
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	133,064
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON—distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts & Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and Centennial Professor at Vanderbilt University—is one of America’s premier public intellectuals and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including JAY-Z, Tears We Cannot Stop, and What Truth Sounds Like, and most recently Long Time Coming. A contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, Dr. Dyson is 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.”

Table of Contents

Prelude: Gold Orb

1: Black Death

2: Blue Plague

3: White Theft

4: Seeing Red

5: White Comfort

Postlude: Evergreen Hope

Acknowledgments

Sources

Editorial Reviews

10/26/2020

Georgetown University sociology professor Dyson (What Truth Sounds Like) offers heartfelt letters to victims of racial injustice in America. In a letter to Emmett Till, Dyson considers how the phenomenon of inherited racial trauma (“We feel the history in our bones”) reverberates through every high-profile racially motivated killing. Writing to Eric Garner, Dyson refers to police as the “blue plague” and “violent enforcers of white supremacy.” In a letter to Breonna Taylor, Dyson examines how Black people stolen from Africa “resisted complete submission to slavery” by faking illness, spoiling crops, and saving their energy during the day to attend dances, worship, and steal food at night. The letter addressed to 15-year-old Chicago murder victim Hadiya Pendleton veers somewhat abruptly into a tangent about cancel culture and the legacy of basketball star Kobe Bryant, but concludes with a cogent call to build a “solid and substantive notion of racial amnesty” for white people “who own up to the fact that they haven’t got this race thing right.” Dyson also provides valuable historical and sociopolitical context in his vivid descriptions of how Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd died. Rich with feeling and insight, this elegiac account hits home. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

ON The Washington Post's 10 BOOKS TO READ IN DECEMBER | LitHub's 12 NEW BOOKS TO BUY FROM YOUR LOCAL INDIE TODAY | HuffPost's 10 OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK RELEASES OF DECEMBER 2020 | Bridge Michigan's 15 ANTI-RACIST MICHIGAN BOOKS TO GET YOU THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS AND QUARANTINE

"The ostensible purpose of Long Time Coming, organized as a string of letters, is to explain what led to the unrest that swept the nation last summer after George Floyd’s killing and what should be done to address it. But Dyson’s grander purpose, perhaps, is to bare the deep wounds left by generations of White-authored violence. He wants readers to feel that pain." —Michael A. Fletcher, The Washington Post

“The writing is smart and the research that informs it is great, but what makes this is an important book is Dyson's voice, which is strong but always pregnant with frustration, pain, admiration and, ultimately, hope.” —NPR Book Review

"[Dyson] is rarely afraid to call out bigotry. In his new book, he imagines what it would be like if victims of racism, police brutality or gang violence had not lost their lives. Each chapter is a letter to what he calls the martyrs of the struggle." —NPR

"Dyson’s formidable twenty-third book probes this tragic notion about the violent silencing of the martyred, with Dyson hosting a poignant conversation...elegantly argued..." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“A sweeping overview of racism in America … A timely, fervent message from an important voice.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Dyson provides valuable historical and sociopolitical context in his vivid descriptions ... Rich with feeling and insight, this elegiac account hits home.” —Publisher's Weekly

"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’s Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, is a brilliant and fiercely eloquent work that traces the roots of racism from slavery and Jim Crow to police brutality and the plague of Black killings in our own day. In gorgeous prose and erudite analysis, Dyson argues that both the trap of white comfort and the peril of cancel culture thwart a genuine reckoning with race in our country. Long Time Coming is a searing cry for racial justice from one of our nation’s greatest thinkers and most compelling prophets." —Robin DiAngelo, bestselling author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

"One of the country’s most prominent scholars on race has a new book" —AP News

“Dyson’s eloquent, exacting, and consequential scrutiny of ‘the racial calamity at the heart of our democracy’ is a catalyst for discussion and continued calls for justice, a work essential to the struggle to achieve insight, genuine change, and healing.” —Booklist, starred review

"In Long Time Coming, social commentator Dyson traces the history of antiblack sentiment that culminated in this reckoning with America’s oldest sin." —AARP Sisters Newsletter

From the Publisher

2020-10-08
A scholar of race looks to the future with hope.

In his latest, an apt follow-up to What Truth Sounds Like and Tears We Cannot Stop, Dyson, a Baptist minister, sociology professor, and contributor to the New York Times and the New Republic, offers a sweeping overview of racism in America through the pretext of letters to seven victims of racial violence: Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Cellphone videos have made such violence shockingly public, stoking widespread anguish: George Floyd’s death, in particular, “struck a nerve.” Although Dyson acknowledges that “something feels different,” he asks, “how far are we willing to go? Are we prepared to sacrifice tradition and convention for genuine transformation?” Each letter offers the author an opportunity to expand upon the complexities of Blacks’ experience of hatred and oppression and to offer tempered suggestions for change. In his letter to Garner, for example, Dyson acknowledges that “Black bodies are still an object of scorn and derision” and “of nearly unconscious rage that rattles the cavernous egos of some men who think themselves mighty because they sport a badge and a gun and have referred swagger.” To counter what he calls the “blue plague,” the author proposes reconstructing police administration “so that the chain of command is shared with multiple agencies of safety and protection” as well as “redesign[ing] the architecture of police units and dispers[ing] their duties across a number of agencies while decentralizing both their composition and their authority.” Writing to Pendleton, killed when she was 15, he shares the “righteous anger” her death provoked, but he warns against responding with cancel culture, which he likens to fascism and sees as “a proxy for white supremacy.” In his letter to fellow clergyman Pinckney, Dyson reveals his enduring yet cautious faith in humanity.

A timely, fervent message from an important voice.

Kirkus Reviews