The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free PDF

didn’t pooh-pooh self-criticism like some do in the highest rungs of government, saloons, malls, some sidewalk streets—and in major parts of the media.
    The factory wasn’t the only place I got a sense of intellectual vocation. I absorbed it in the sanctuary as well. My pastor, Frederick G. Sampson, was an American original, a tall, commanding, impossibly literate dark-brown prince of the pulpit who lived up to that title when it still resonated in the world of homiletics. It was Sampson, more than any figure in my life, who convinced me of the service that intellectuals must render. Sampson believed that those who breathed the life of the mind must serve the people in whose womb they came to exist. His thinking made sense to me because of how faithfully he adhered to his own principle. He wasn’t a preacher who festooned his pulpit oratory with violent grunts or theatrical posing, though he was a verbal master with dramatic flair. Sampson unabashedly laced his rhetoric with the theology and poetry and philosophy heardently consumed. In the pulpit, he moved effortlessly from Bertrand Russell to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Shakespeare to Paul Laurence Dunbar, and from the King’s English spoken to the Queen’s taste to the wily black vernaculars that bathed the tongues of his Southern kinsmen. Outside the pulpit, Sampson’s insatiable curiosity lead him to devour books and to traffic in ideas, wherever he could get good ones, whether from the mouth of a learned colleague or the neighborhood drunk. Critical encounter was nearly erotic to him, but the joy and passion he brought to intellectual life didn’t obscure its necessary everydayness, its practical application, its edifying repetitiveness, and most of all, its usefulness to common folk.
    Sampson believed that his preaching and thinking should open the minds and hearts of the people who listened to him. They should, he believed, find surer footing in their faith because of the words he carefully chose. At the same time, he challenged the dogmatisms of all true believers, whether they were pew dwellers or zealous ideologues. Sampson stirred things up by staring them down: he refused to blink away the encroaching doubts that made belief improbable to outsiders (and to more insiders than were willing to admit it), inviting his flock to wrestle with feelings of divine abandonment and the unanswerable tragedies that smear our existence. But none of this kept him from making the church a conduit of social justice for ordinary folk who might never darken the doors of his sanctuary. And above all, he believed that the black privileged should use their considerable economic and intellectual resources to help those who lag far behind.
    It is because of Sampson that I believe that intellectuals must serve the communities we live and work in. We’ve got to look beyond a comfortable career, a safe niche behind academe’s protective walls, and a serene existence removed from cultural and political battles that shape the nation’s fate. But we must be willing to shirk the contemptuous pose of distant observer—undoubtedly, we still need observation, and it mustn’t be fatally intertwined in the events or ideas we’re called on to examine, but intellectuals must at some point get our hands dirty as we help our world become more just. We must even be willing to give up one of academe’s most self-serving bombasts: that “serious” thinkers stand apart from the seductions of pop culture to dig into archives and render compelling histories of events long before our time. That’s all good, but it’s surely not all-knowing about what intellectuals are good for. In a show of remarkable adolescence, and obsolescence too, there are many academics who believe that speaking in the tongue of the common person betrays the profession. Well, perhaps that’s so, but it’s a betrayal we should be proud of, and one that should spur us to resist the tedius professionalism that has noisily