Imani Perry > Quotes

“Living as prayer. I think that is when I am at my best. Because seeing through prayer provides a remarkable clarity. Not in the doctrinal sense, but because it is, at best, the lens of a love for every tattered inch of this earth.”
― Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

“We are running out of time, the earth is ravaged, our bodies are indefinite; Lorraine reminds us to make use of each moment.”
― Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

“...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music—one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists— for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have.”
― Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

“just hope it’s still living then. The trees don’t know your race or your gender identity or your sexuality. The trees don’t expel you”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“Acting like you know everything and acting like you don't know how to be respectful will keep you ignorant. Be humble.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“We haunt the past to refuse to let it lie comfortably as it was.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“While the South lost the Civil War technically, White Southerners did not in fact lose the war substantively. After all, Jim Crow, convict labor, and lynching happened with near total impunity, and African Americans experienced decades of pernicious neglect from the federal courts and government. Exploitation ran amok. Inequality persists. And the nation turning a refusing eye, allowing the Southerners to work out their own business over the lives of Black people on the land of the Indigenous all across the region, gave the South their victory lap.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“People, especially elders, repeat stories over and over again with purpose. In the arrogance of youth, we often think they do I because they are absent-minded. Now I know they repeat themselves because they’ve whittled like down into observations that should not be forgotten. They are authoring scriptures of their own.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“And yes, slavery was abolished, Jim Crow is over, but the prisons, the persistence of poverty, are constant reminders of how the past made the present.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“Melancholy is part of social movement, as is restraint. They are companions. The work of organizing for freedom requires a management of rage that can break your heart. There is no good reason one should have to endure spittle and bombs, insult, dogs, and jail in order to achieve simple legal recognition.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“One of the things I have learned about death is this: no matter how grief stricken you are, no matter how much you miss them, yearning for their laughs or hands or eyes, your relationship to the dead continues long after their bodies are gone. Memory is not simply a way of holding on, it is a reencounter. Their visits continue as long as you do..”
― Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

“Self-regard takes many forms, and it is the precondition for seeing to a future not yet realized but deeply yearned for—that is freedom.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“If you look at African American newspapers from the very early 20th century, there is an ongoing discussion about the problems with policing. Literally nonstop 100 plus year problem...

(4/12/2021 on Twitter)”
― Imani Perry

“This blue-black living and doing is a bittersweet virtue, mastery in heartbreak, and raw laughter from the underside. We people who created a sound for the world’s favorite color—the blues—offer a testimony.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“There are no historic firsts, no grand gestures, no monuments or museums that undo generations of exclusions under law, policy, and practice, or that stop the expulsion. It makes me want to holler. Tell the truth. What is this symbolic republic?”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“That's the calling, to see through time in order to see today. Each act of haunting and witnessing the past is also the work of living in the along. You know the plot device of time-travel stories, how if the contemporary figure goes into the past, her meddling can forever shape the future? In popular culture, that's considered a bad thing. But in our lives, it can be holy.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“You see? Blue is a portal. Our ancestors have worked so hard from the other side to keep us going; this is how we tend to them in return.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“So I went deeper into an archive of historical memory, hoping to sort it out”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“Literacy was the goal the newly free. But it was also a habit for staying free. Jim Crow controlled where one walked, shopped, worked, rode, ailed, died, and wept. And that was according to law. Outside the law were lynch ropes and burned towns. Against that backdrop, education was one thing no one could take away from you just when it seemed like damn near everything promised was snatched away.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“A romance of Africa, a romance of America, a fetish of nationalism, myths of superior origins, or rankings of authenticity or admixture-each type of posturing, myth, and hierarchy is a danger because they lead us to either believe the funhouse distortion of the blue-eyed mirror or run away from the ugliness of history.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“The driver's gentility, despite the fact that he could have, could still, string me up without the world flinching? That toothless smile that could easily accompany either mirth or murderousness, depending on the eyes? This is what Black folks mean when we say we prefer the Southern White person's honest racism to the Northern liberal's subterfuge. It is not physically more benign, or more dependable. But it is transparent in the way it terrorizes. You never forget to have your shoulders hitched up a little and taut, even (and especially) when they call you 'sweetheart.' Cold comfort.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“On each hand that day, my uncle wore a single lapis ring. I was curious and asked him questions. Later he sent me articles about the symbolic meanings of lapis. I told him that I live according to one of his precepts, that as long as I can read, I can teach myself to do anything. Even survive a broken heart. And I have found something out along this way of grief-reading the sound and color and text. We Black people are not quite like other Americans. We do not live in the same fantasy that we might evade death by collecting things like dollars, houses, fences, and passports. But we are as human as humans come. The incomprehensible keeps happening. Death comes fast, frequent and unfair. And we're still here. We know how to breathe underwater. Living after death.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Beloved is an embodied sorrow—the returned dead—who has to be contended with, coming from the water. Morrison knew Black life is a sea epic—a story of encounters with deep blue. There was no other way to get us so far from where our ancestors began.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“What I mean when I say that my people gave a sound to the world's favorite color is this: In the blue above, flight is possible. In the blue over the edge of the ship, one plummets to death. Hell was the bottom of the ocean floor until it became salvation. You had to swing mighty low to bring them up to the blue sky, weightless to memory and suffering. A voice could do it; a chorus could ensure it. In the main and in the meantime of history, Blackness insisted upon standing inside of life with a song. The series of catastrophic encounters on the coast of West Africa, the degradation that took on myriad forms in the Americas, and then the broken promise of freedom and citizenship, well, that was all awful. But conditions being what they were, people kept living with what was at their disposal like blackberries on the bramblebush.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“I prayed against the cruel violence of dominion and diminishment. And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves. That God is far more tender than the one she praises, even to women like her.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“You might be thinking by now that this blue thing I'm talking about is mere device, a literary trick to move through historic events. And if blue weren't a conjure color, that might have been true. But, for real, the blue in Black is nothing less than truth before trope. Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be. But everybody doesn't love Black—many have hated it-and that is inhumane. If you don't already, I will make you love it with my blues song.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Quilters experiment with shape, pattern, and color. Their most consistent color, it's worth noting, is blue. But the quilt is also a metaphor, or better yet an aesthetic statement, that is evident in hoodoo too. Out of the remainders, the bits and pieces of discarded and worn fabric, life was crafted. Its use could not be limited to what we call "utility," though it was functional, even aesthetically speaking, because beauty is a function too. And beauty—if we release its meaning from the colloquial prison of whether a human body is ranked worthy—is one of the most democratic of virtues. Anyone—with a gesture of kindness, a moment of sweetness, a twist of ribbon, a beating drum— can make, be, and feel beauty. Gazing up into the sky, or out into the water, is, we now know, as essential to the human condition as a sip of water and the taste of oxygen. The living made from underneath the law and inside the category of Blackness was holistic and beauty-full to its very core.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Academic descriptions of Blackness fail to explain how at the heart of being Black is a testimony about the universal power of existence. I wanted to write you (and me) something more. I wanted to offer truth with a heartbeat. And so, I steadily collected Black stories of blue and the blues-both literal and figurative. As I plotted them out, I found that my collection of tales was already bound together in a tight weave. I wasn't constructing a story; I was revealing and witnessing, quilting something present.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and the omega. An end in itself. —GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ1 Since this may be the only life it is sensible to make it full and alive and rich and satisfying —DENNIS BRUTUS’2”
― Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

“It's freedom we're seeking, after all; it's not a war or a board game in which we easily declare victory or defeat.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People