Outsiders do this in part to compartmentalize, ignore, and scapegoat: it’s the place where Northerners can comfortably shunt racism as something that isn’t their own but instead the legacy of the Klan and lynching. “I have learned in the course of my travels that there are ‘Souths,’ plural as much as singular,” she writes. Rural Floridians are not Alabamans are not Appalachians are not Black Belters, but north of the Mason-Dixon line, the scapegoating instinct is the same. Indeed, she argues, conventional wisdom has it exactly backward: the resistance to the diversity of the South reveals a racist instinct to apply uniformity that has infected the rest of the country. Imani Perry’s rangy, observant book, South to America, is in large part an attempt to undo that reflex, to expose multiple Souths. Southern accents, Southern music, Southern politics, and Southern race relations all tend to reduce to generalizations once they escape the orbit of the South itself.

Later, when movement was limited, she found that she could pull on memories from a lifetime of traveling around the South to enrich her accounts.Northerners reflexively understand that New York is not Chicago is not L.A., but for many of those same people the South is the South through and through - a monolith, singular. Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, spent five years visiting the locations from the Upper South to the Caribbean that are highlighted in the chapters of “South to America.” Until the pandemic hit, she was often driving from place to place. It’s an invitation to consider that, maybe, the frameworks, or even the battles that we’re having over the frameworks, are not sufficient.”

“I’m not telling people the whole history of the South. So the choices are always political,” Perry told NBC News. 17.Īstrid Stawiarz / Getty Images for Brooklyn Academy of Music fileĪlong the way, she shines a light on some of the area’s overlooked and willfully buried stories, writing from the perspective of a student of Southern history and literature, while crafting a deeply personal narrative about going home. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. Imani Perry speaks at the Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

South to america imani perry