Those moments are not going to be casually passed by anymore. There were a lot of people who gave their lives for it. If someone hurls a slur at me in Birmingham, there's almost certainly going to be violence to follow. I have never in any place in the South had someone call me a racial slur.īut also part of the reason I haven't heard slurs in the South is that something will happen if that moment occurs.
That's the place where I experienced racial terror with bottles thrown at our car and having slurs hurled at me. People are astonished when I tell them this, but my fear about race as a kid was ignited in Boston. "And then it allows the rest of the country to conceive of itself as relatively pristine." "The South in some ways becomes the repository for the nation's sins, right?" she says. Though popular culture often dismisses the South as backward and racist, Perry says that's a mischaracterization that, too often, lets the rest of the country off the hook. In her new book, South to America, she recounts her travels to the South - its cities, rural areas and historic sites - and reflects on the region's history of slavery and racism. Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, was born in Birmingham, Ala., and has always considered it home, even though she moved north as a child. "It is, in some ways, an origin point for the way the whole nation operates." "The ideas about race, we get them from the way the stage was set in the South from the beginning," she says. 17.Īstrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Brooklyn Academy of MusicĪuthor Imani Perry says if you really want to know the United States, you must first understand the South.
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in New York, on Jan. Imani Perry speaks at the Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
0 kommentar(er)
