By: Sam Downs & Nate Luce
Last month, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Community partnered with the Black Law Students Association to host Dr. Michael Eric Dyson for the Law School’s Black History Month Keynote Address. A well-known and influential contributor to national conversations on race and racial justice, Dr. Dyson is the University Distinguished Professorship of African American and Diaspora Studies, University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Divinity School, and Centennial Chair in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt.
Dr. Dyson’s address, BHM, BLM, DEI, CRT, AI AND AP: Alphabets Against American Amnesia, spanned American history to explain and explore the current state of race in the U.S.
Black History Month and “American Amnesia”
Dr. Dyson began the talk by explaining the notion of “American Amnesia” – coping with “pain too deep, the pain too powerful,” by “choosing to forget.” He cited efforts by southern constituents to reframe the civil war as one of states’ rights instead of slavery, and how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. became the “symbol of color-blind ideals that really contradicted his most fervent advocacy.”
“Amnesia is the choice of people who are traumatized by memories too painful to remember, and yet it does the nation a great disservice,” he summarized.
For Dr. Dyson, Black History Month demands engagement with the concepts that are central to Black history, “not just celebrating the greats.” From understanding the roles that Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Baines Johnson played in the quest for civil rights to exploring the relationship between hip-hop and country music, he stressed the need for Americans to understand that Black history is American history.
Black Lives Matter, DEI, and Plagiarism
American Amnesia obfuscates that link between Black and American history, according to Dr. Dyson. “We rush to try to cleanse the palate of an elegant aesthetic life of the taste of blackness,” he said. “We love your style. We just don’t want your burden. We don’t want to bear the history of acknowledging what we have done.”
This approach, according to Dr. Dyson, leads to book bans and a misunderstanding and rejection of movements like Black Lives Matter. “When we say, ‘black lives matter,’ we’re saying, ‘black lives matter also.’” For Dr. Dyson, Black Lives Matter promotes the humanity of Black people, to remove doubts about their humanity and intelligence.
He juxtaposed these concepts with the charges of plagiarism against former Harvard President Claudine Gay, noting that we have “snatched the copyright of our culture and our imprimatur and made it yours. You subordinated us as we built American civilization, so 11 papers pales in comparison” before joking that his students would not fare well using that excuse for plagiarism in his classroom.
Dr. Dyson went on to link Gay’s removal with the backlash against DEI initiatives – “people said ‘oh my God, they hired this Black woman, it must be DEI.’” He stressed the importance of DEI in combatting historic inequities in education for people of color, to turn factors once considered demerits into merits. “Mediocrity (doesn’t have any) color,” he said.
Critical Race Theory, AI, and the Cure for American Amnesia
Dr. Dyson argued that many parents misunderstand Critical Race Theory (CRT) because they have been misled by people who want them to believe that CRT will turn white kids against white parents. He stressed that CRT is a legal theory designed to help people navigate the “combustible realities and properties of race.”
He warned that disinformation, perpetuated by politicians as well as AI deepfakes and algorithms that have already demonstrated bias, would perpetuate this American Amnesia. For Dr. Dyson, the aforementioned “Alphabets” — BHM, BLM, CRT, DEI, and even AI – have the capacity to counteract this state. “The United States of America is officially rebutted by belonging to the kingdom of memory,” he said. “These alphabets are critical to preserve the possibility of America becoming all that it should be.”
