blake

“One strange feature of Blackness is how often it is treated as static. Like Black just is as it will ever be. But displaced and misnamed people are ever evolving out of necessity. The truth is the condition is like waterways, blood vessels, circuits.”
― Imani Perry, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“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

“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

“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