Name: What Truth Sounds Like
ISBN: 9781250199416

Michael Eric Dyson

Examines the events surrounding the 1963 meeting between Robert F. Kennedy and James Baldwin in New York City, as well as its impact on race relations in the United States from then to now.

Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

What Truth Sounds Like

Rachel Benton

I have been wanting to reads this book since I heard Michael Eric Dyson interview on the view. The story centers around a meeting that took place in civil rights era between Bobby Kennedy, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, and other well known black activist at the time. Dyson states in his book that RFK changed during this meeting. He had to face up to his own prejudice and hear some hard truths from the black community. The meeting ultimately changed his views on race and elevated his place in history. I have to say that I have a love/hate relationship with Michael Eric Dyson. I’m really having a hard time even rating this book, because there is stuff that I really liked and was all on board with, and other things that are so way off base that it made want to throw the book to wall when i was reading it. My emotions were all over the place when reading this book. I liked how he used the meeting with RFK, Baldwin, and other activist to explain certain events that are going on today. Some of my criticism with Dyson is that I think that he gets on his soap box to much, and just because it's his truth doesn’t mean that rings true for everyone else. I think his assessments of President Obama and Senator Bernie Sander’s was way off base. I think that President Obama has helped the black community, just because he is not doing it in the way that you want him to doesn’t mean that he is not doing it. Plus I think it's really easy to judge when your not the one sitting in the President seat. Overall I liked the book. There was more good then bad that was for sure. I came out of it wanting to know more about James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, and other key members of the civil rights movement.

Named a 2018 Notable Work of Nonfiction by The Washington Post NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner, The 2018 Southern Book Prize NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY: Chicago Tribune • Time • Publisher's Weekly A stunning follow up to New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop The Washington Post: "Passionately written." Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "A beautifully written book." Shaun King: “I kid you not–I think it’s the most important book I’ve read all year...” Harry Belafonte: “Dyson has finally written the book I always wanted to read...a tour de force.” Joy-Ann Reid: A work of searing prose and seminal brilliance... Dyson takes that once in a lifetime conversation between black excellence and pain and the white heroic narrative, and drives it right into the heart of our current politics and culture, leaving the reader reeling and reckoning." Robin D. G. Kelley: “Dyson masterfully refracts our present racial conflagration... he reminds us that Black artists and intellectuals bear an awesome responsibility to speak truth to power." 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.

What Truth Sounds Like Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

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