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

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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

“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

“James Field Stanfield was a sailor aboard the True Blue in a 1775 voyage from West Africa to Jamaica and then Liverpool.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“Slave ships changed ecosystems. Blue-green tiger sharks, with stripes along their sides, took to the taste of human bodies. Tiger sharks will eat anything. Some people chose that end over the hell ship, diving with the belief that the afterlife would restore them to belonging and, better yet, home. There was good reason to escape life. The Middle Passage was a terrible journey through a blue netherworld. I have wondered about the ones who leaped, or were thrown to their deaths, or after death, overboard, ravaged bodies with hollowed eyes flying off the deck, through the air, into ocean. What did they see in all that blue?”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“As far back as I can remember, I was aware of belonging to a group for whom the word “color” was potent. “The color of your skin,” “colored people,” “colorful people,” and “people of color” are all phrases that are associated with us Black Americans. And while “black” is our nominal color, even though our bodies range from alabaster to jet, the blues are our sensibility, hence the designation made famous by the writer Amiri Baraka: “blues people.”
― 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

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“When a person was placed on an auction block, they were actively removed from civil society. But when the enslaved adorned burial grounds and even their own bodies, they sustained a belief in their souls and intellect.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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 National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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 – The National Book Award Winner's Cultural Meditation on Race, Blues, and Identity

“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

“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

“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