[3] Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two",[4] Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as race, religion and politics as well as biographies on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Jay-Z.

[9] In his 2006 book Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Dyson analyzes the political and social events in the wake of the catastrophe against the backdrop of an overall "failure in race and class relations".

[10][11][12] In 2010, Dyson edited Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, with contributions based on the album's tracks by, among others, Kevin Coval, Kyra D. Gaunt ("Professor G"), dream hampton, Marc Lamont Hill, Adam Mansbach, and Mark Anthony Neal.

[13] Dyson's own essay in this anthology, "'One Love', Two Brothers, Three Verses", argues that the current US penal system disfavors young black males more than any other segment of the population.

[16] In May 2018, he participated in the Munk debate on political correctness, arguing alongside Michelle Goldberg against Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson.

Dyson served on the board of directors of the Common Ground Foundation, a project dedicated to empowering urban youth in the United States.