Imani Perry

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“Keep it small. One of the best writing lessons is to remember that stories are intimate. Keep [the focus] small and specific because you can be overwhelmed if you think about everything. Be attentive– a kind of love. Locate your attention in a loving gaze.”

“I hope that it opens more conversations and contemplations.”

“The tradition of black folks holding onto things because they knew they were important means a lot to history and scholarship.”

“Institutions and professional organizations have held onto papers that other people didn’t think were important and it turns out they can be instrumental to historians and researchers.”

“In the [current] battles over what we are going to teach, the reality is the story itself is the conflict. Who matters and who doesn’t? These are issues that have been struggled over for hundreds of years. That’s what the duality teaches us.”

“Listening deeply. To me, writing is an invitation to listen. And it creates a ‘sympathetic vibration,’ as in music when you are playing and someone facing you is playing and makes the strings on the other instrument tremble. Listening has that same possibility. You have to be open to hearing that. We often don’t listen, particularly to people who are deemed not important in our society.”

“For me, it’s a responsibility but not a burden. It brings us to an understanding of how do you live a life of meaning and purpose? How do you bear witness to the truth as you see it.”

“I think of them as kindred spirits. The 1619 Project is an intervention into telling the history in a more rigorous and truthful way, than the official story that marginalizes and erases black life from that story and also eliminates the harm [that resulted].”

“When they called my name, I was stunned. That moment changed my life.”

“So it feels like a place that is one of the sites of my own beginning.”

“But really, there are so many gems in her archive. If I had my druthers, we’d have a whole shelf of Hansberry titles.”

““Emily Jones” was her pseudonym for her lesbian-themed work. The short stories, novellas, and mini-essays ought to be published (or republished as the case may be). She was a fierce intellectual as well as an artist: there is a body of exceptional essays by her about race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and capitalism that I want the public to have access to. Finally, she wrote short plays that engage with the work of Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht that I love.”

“The South has always had to carry this nation’s water. The United States became a global economic power because of its vast source of unfree labor in the South: Black people. Economic development depended not only upon their physical labor, and skill, but their reproductive labor. Generations of Southern Black babies were born to fill the nation’s coffers. It’s horrifying. But it is dishonest to put the burden of all that on the South. To act as though it is some vulgar racist backwater that the rest of the country is above is deceptive.”

“And I don’t just mean the hate-filled people, although there are far too many of them, but all of us who accommodate so much suffering every day. I look to the past, I look to the imagination, I look to the interior, trying to figure out how we get from here to a future of ethical and kind human relations.”

“I was hooked. That book pulled me away from math and into American studies.”

“The thread of connection between the emotion, the intellect, and the imagination compels me. In that triangle is something that is fundamentally human.”