Just finished reading Imani Perry's latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Perry is the author of four other books and is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In other words, she is a scholar, an academician, and an intellectual. Her writing is dense and often profound, so this is no easy beach read. What it is, is a serious attempt by a very smart Black woman, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago with activist parents, to come to grips with her heritage and how American race relations have shaped her and our country.
And Perry comes at her subject from so many angles it slowly becomes a revelation of how we as a nation find ourselves today. So if there is anyone who believes that systematic racism no longer exists, they need to read this book. Part history, part polemic, part pilgrimage, part personal history, South to America is a stirring story of race in America and how deeply it affects us all:
"Isn't that what we want, that irrepressible hope? Maybe it isn't just an American mythos. Maybe it's an American wonder. After all, from the bottom, from the depths, from the fields, from the ashes, hope just keeps on rising and radiating off sweat-glowing skin in Southern heat."
And Perry comes at her subject from so many angles it slowly becomes a revelation of how we as a nation find ourselves today. So if there is anyone who believes that systematic racism no longer exists, they need to read this book. Part history, part polemic, part pilgrimage, part personal history, South to America is a stirring story of race in America and how deeply it affects us all:
"Isn't that what we want, that irrepressible hope? Maybe it isn't just an American mythos. Maybe it's an American wonder. After all, from the bottom, from the depths, from the fields, from the ashes, hope just keeps on rising and radiating off sweat-glowing skin in Southern heat."
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