Imani Perry
Appearances
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
You know, the process of creating beauty at the site of wound, it happens over and over and over again in black culture and life. And I was able to do it through the story of a really cherished musician for me personally, but I think for the world.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah, so part of the reason it started to feel like more than a coincidence to me was actually encountering a letter written by a fabric trader in the 18th century in reference to a planter who was purchasing cloth for the people enslaved on his plantation farm. to make clothing.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And the fabric trader mentioned that the planter said that he had to bring back blue cloth, otherwise the women, the black women who were enslaved, wouldn't want it. And so, you know, there's something extraordinary about these women who were enslaved insisting upon a particular color for adornment. And that has lots of roots.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
I think, you know, in some ways blue is a color that has captivated the whole world, which is why indigo was so popular. But also there were, you know, spiritual and social meanings to the color blue in various parts of West and Central Africa. And that were probably sort of part of the root of that aesthetic desire.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so then when I see the repetition of the blue and particularly the repetition among black women of the South, I think of it as a color that certainly had a kind of grace and elegance. It's not too, you know, frou-frou. It's pretty, but it has a seriousness to it. And it's a color that's associated with power, culturally speaking. And so I don't think it's coincidence because there are these...
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
The truth is this. Black as such began in nobly through conquering eyes. Writing that makes me wince because I hold my black tightly, proudly even. Honesty requires a great deal of discomfort. But here's the truth. We didn't start out black. Nor did we choose it first. Black was a hard-earned love.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
unbelievably important moments where it appears and I don't think there's a kind of I don't assume that for those women they said well I'm going to wear blue because of this but I think we're often drawn to colors and styles and forms of adornment as a way of communicating a message to the world and asserting something about ourselves and so I you know I think those blues were powerful blues they were and they were also
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
you know, elegant blues and beautiful blues.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah. So, you know, so I chart a course of that by initially thinking about the term the boys in blue, which we now think about as terms of policing. But in the context of the Civil War, we're Union soldiers. And there was the sense of promise when the boys in blue arrived and this sense of extraordinary power.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Not just courage, but liberation when black soldiers were able to don Union Blue and free themselves and free their people because they were so essential to the Union war effort to save the nation. So that blue was a kind of powerful sense of the boys in blue and a positive sense of the boys in blue.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
But through it all, the blue blues, the certainty of the brilliant sky, deep water, and melancholy, have never left us. I can attest. You might be thinking by now that this blue thing I'm talking about is mere device, a literary trick to move through historic events. And if blue weren't a conjure color, that might have been true.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And I also, one of the things that I tried to talk somewhat about was also about, you know, the naval forces and the Marines for black soldiers, because that's a sort of under-discussed part of the history of the Civil War, also in blue. Something happens to the color that coincides in some ways with the betrayal of the nation.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Reconstruction is turned away from this abandonment of the rights and liberties of black people who have in many ways been central to saving the nation. allowing for Jim Crow to take hold. And then the blue uniforms that were part of the Civil War effort are turned into police uniforms because they're around and they're
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
They're usable and they're easy and, you know, to turn into uniforms of a different sort. And it also is part of this history of a very difficult relationship between police forces and black Americans.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
I, for me, this is not a question of the sort where we usually discuss, you know, our police force is racist, but rather when you exist in a society that has in many ways posited you as inferior or threatening or undeserving, then of course the force of policing is going to not just be...
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
a warm and fuzzy relationship to you, of course you're going to be under greater threat and suspicion and punishment. And so that becomes part of the story of this country. It's not as though that was sort of something new that emerged in the Black Lives Matter era. You can look at newspapers 100 years ago that depict the difficult relationship between black people and police forces.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so the retort to Black Lives Matter as Blue Lives Matter is extraordinary because it posits the idea that for black people to live is a threat to policing. That's essentially what the formulation is. It's pretty remarkable.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Oh, I learned so much. So here's the thing. I have spent much more time before working on this book in thinking about and studying, of course, cotton, but also tobacco, right? And so to turn my attention, and even sugar, and so to turn my attention to indigo was something different.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And part of what I learned, one, is these scenes from the historical record of people being exchanged for a block of indigo were just absolutely devastating to me. People who were artisans and family members and skilled for who had been adorned in indigo now seeing their worth measured in dye, right? I mean, it just is sort of unbelievably... poignant sense of what it meant to be enslaved.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
But for real, the blue in black is nothing less than truth before trope. Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be. But everybody doesn't love black. Many have hated it, and that is inhumane. If you don't already, I will make you love it with my blues song.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And then in the context of U.S. slavery, and particularly South Carolina, having read about Eliza Pinckney, who is known as the person who sort of brought indigo to the states in And a very young, precocious white woman plantation owner. And realizing that she struggled with the cultivation of indigo until an unnamed black person was brought to teach her how to cultivate it.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And that the realization that that is part actually of the creation of certainly part of the institution of slavery, but also part of the creation of race is that this person who actually was the educator would not be credited for allowing this trade to flourish. And also, at the same time, other black people's lives would be, you know, made available.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
really unbearable by virtue of the success of this trade. Indigo is very hard to cultivate. It stinks. It makes you sick. There's flies. There's vermin. It's one of these really hard things to make. And so that to me, it just was so poignant how that industry could actually communicate something about what it meant for Black people to be racialized as such.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah, yeah. I'm very interested in talking about products like indigo and sugar because, not to the exclusion of things like indigo, sugar, tobacco, not to the exclusion of rice and cotton, but because those were luxuries. And to think about what it meant for people's lives to be ground down in the service of something that was for another person's delight is really...
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
a powerful reckoning with some of the ugliest parts of what it means to be human. And I don't mean that simply in terms of the history of slavery. I mean, these are questions we can ask ourselves today. Why are we allowing for so many industries to flourish that allow human beings to suffer for our pleasure?
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah. And the Congo, you know, it's... Oh, the repetition is so painful. You know, the people of the Congo die at extraordinary rates for us to have these phones and these computers. And, of course, for African Americans, so much of our culture comes from the Congo culture.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Historically, we have, you know, much of the sort of blended culture that we have in the United States or in the Americas is derived from the root of Congo culture. And so
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
It becomes part of the story, you know, that the story moves in multiple directions, but there is a repetition of suffering and, of course, also a repetition of people trying to figure out how not only to make do but to live in profound and meaningful ways.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Oh, you know, it's hard. I mean, when we talk about the difficulty of writing, we often talk about the crafting of sentences, which is, of course, hard, and the putting together structure. But there's also the emotional component. You actually, I think, do or you should try to grasp
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Of course, I fail, but try to grasp what it was to be snatched from everything, you know, to be thrown into the hold of a ship in unbelievably horrifying conditions, chained together, sometimes chained to people who... We're dead. And so, and of course that meant a kind of disorientation that is nearly unfathomable.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
So, I mean, I have sort of roundabout answer to that question. It's a beautiful question. And it may have more than anything to do with the blues. So it's the genre of music that is sort of the foundation of African-American music, certainly, and the foundation of American music generally.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so to then look to the sky and the water and think, well, maybe something there, right? Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's, maybe that's a path to return, right? And it's understandable and I think offers something much more kind of complex than simply saying people chose to end their lives because I do think it was a much more complex reality.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah. So, I mean, there's almost, you know, an immediate backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement. And you get that in the context of the Reagan era pretty aggressively and, of course, an attack on the social safety net at the same time. And then much like the post-Reconstruction period, you also have this flourishing of Black art.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And in particular, in the 80s, on the one hand, you have hip-hop, which is largely kind of a masculinist form. And you also, on the other hand, you have literature, which is heavily being made by Black women, these extraordinary novelists, the ones we all know and love, you know, from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Paula Marshall, and
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
and Tezaki Shange, they're producing this tradition in that period. Part of the reason, of course, in this book that I had to talk about it is blue appears frequently in that work. But it's also just this remarkable period, even as there is this full-scale attack on, in many ways, and rejection of the progress of Black people and
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
that there is this sort of digging down insistence that we have something to say. And that work is so resilient. And I don't know, we don't necessarily describe it as such, but that period was just unbelievable. And for me, as someone who was a voracious reader and who is – Still a voracious reader. I'm a reader first in some ways and a writer second. That's the landscape in which I grew up.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And it is, as I say, sort of a sound of the world's favorite color, meaning that it captures both the joy and the melancholy. You know, having the blues, when you have the blues, rather, playing the blues can act as a means of kind of curing the blues. You know, it has this movement through the spectrum of emotions, this deeply human sensibility to it.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah, I mean, so everything that I research is under attack from many sectors in the society. And I think of it as on the one hand, you know, it's devastating, but not so much personally, but because I'm so aware of how much the generation immediately preceding mine, you know, my parents' generation, how hard they fought to have our stories and our history taken seriously.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
How many of them were kicked out of school? How many of them devoted their lives to a struggle that they didn't survive to see win, didn't survive to see actually take place? This is a period where there is an effort to relitigate the 60s and 70s and all of the transformations of that period. So for me, though, as a faculty member,
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
who studies these things that are under attack, I'm finding myself consistently turning actually to people from the past. And this is what I mean. I'm turning to thinking about those enslaved people who learned to read despite the risk of death and who never, you know, despite that danger, insisted that this was a pathway to freedom. I'm thinking about
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Those educators who insisted on the study of black people and black life and black history and black culture, despite the fact that they were told that black people had not contributed meaningfully to any civilization. I'm thinking about it being 99 years since antiquity. Negro History Week was formally established.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And that celebration happening in underfunded, segregated schools, students being nevertheless given a glorious story of their own past. I'm thinking about it being 125 years since the writing of Lift Every Voice and Sing, which I wrote a book about called May We Forever Stand. You know, this
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
The song that became the national anthem for black people at a time when black people were systematically excluded from virtually every sector of society except for labor. And so it's not new to do this work under adverse conditions. And I am standing in a tradition of people who did extraordinary work under adverse conditions. And so I feel equipped to do it despite that.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And I will continue to do it even if by some, you know, turn of events. I can't do it in the same way or in the same type of institutions. This is my, you know, it's my life work.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so there was something about the universality of the color blue and the power of the sound of the blues, the way the sound of my people coming out of the Deep South, coming out of a history of enslavement, coming out of having this identity cast upon them and making something beautiful, creating beauty at the very sight of wound. There was something about...
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
An admission. I am very much an American, and that is an uneasy title for me. I have a culture and an identity tied to this land. I am without apology who and what I am. The unease is about the relationship between my citizenship and the rest of the world. My blackness is a conduit, but my American-ness is so often a betrayal of that connection with others.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
I know the classic response is coming from some. People want to come here from all over the world. The American dream is universal. I think that dream is of a castle of security that exists inside the palace gates. I come from inside the territory, but outside the gates, so I know better. But I have one take. There are many others. We are no monolith. This is my blues.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Oh, you know, on the one hand, I will say I am endlessly sort of grateful and in disbelief that I get to do this thing, writing books, because books are so important to me. I feel so fortunate to be able to write books. And this book was hard and painful at moments, but also an absolute joy to be able to offer to the world.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
But part of what it did for me and writing does for me in general is it helps me make sense of the world. It helps me make sense of my place in the world. It helps me develop a confidence that there is possibility. You know, there's something very hopeful about the act of writing because it's a thing that you hope to leave behind. on the earth when you're no longer here in physical form.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And because this book was so spiritually inflected and so dependent on ancestors and the past, I felt really in tune with this journey that will end for me but will continue after my life. Maya Angelou says that said that thing that was so profound in an interview where she said, I didn't come here to stay. And that orientation, I think, is helpful as we try to figure out ways to tell the truth.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so writing the book has really been a personal gift, and I'm just deeply hoping that it feels that way to my readers as well.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
the way in which those two senses of blue coincided so profoundly that actually for me became a pathway to thinking about blackness and in some ways the absolute tragedy of the failure to recognize its beauty.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And so, you know, the book is a journey through that, a journey through both the anguish, but of course, which you have to acknowledge, but of course, this remarkable beauty that actually has a resonance with everyone, even when they deny it. So, you know, I guess that's the simplest way I can think about saying how that connection emerged for me.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
It's a beautiful question because, you know, it's the in-between. It's the slurred note. It's that which isn't recognized on the Western scale. And of course it is recognized, you know, increasingly musicians have been talking about a blues scale and there are other scales in which what we refer to as blue notes in this context are, you know, are understood just as notes.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And that's actually just a wonderful example because... the blue note or the addition of the blue note to the sound of American music transforms it much in the way that there's something indispensable about the presence of black people in the United States and in what it becomes. And at the same time, it is its own thing. And also it has connections to these other genres of music. And I
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
It's a beautiful example for me of actually the combination of African-Americans being American, becoming a people in the context of the United States, and also having these connections that are like arteries to the rest of the black world. And so, you know, there are references in the book to that.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Haitian history and Brazilian history and history of the Congo and all of these very deep connections that are present. And so the blue note really is like that. And it is something that you are attuned to. You can hear it. It operates intuitively, I think, for listeners of American music. And in some ways, that is the whole thing. Because American music has journeyed everywhere, right?
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Even if you don't have its formal definition or even if you can't describe it. And there's something to that as well in this story, right? There is a presence and a power that isn't necessarily fully articulated here. that comes through this particular history. So, you know, the music really does, it's not even just, it's not just metaphorical.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
It functions as a kind of representation or an example of the fact of being black and particularly being black American.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
Yeah, so the original version of the song actually took place in a black musical, and it was sung by a dark-skinned black woman who was actually talking about colorism in the black community and the kind of preference for lighter-skinned women. And the transition is beautiful, but what Armstrong does is it's this example of the sort of multi-layered references that exist in both black and blue.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
So there's—and it's a song that bridges blues and jazz as well, so it has this blues phrasing and sensibility, but then with the horns and the scatting, you hear the kind of growing complexity of jazz. And we have black and blue in the sense of being bruised, and you have blues in the sense of melancholy, and of course, the general sense of sort of the blues that exist along with blackness.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And in Armstrong's personal life... You have this struggle around being a person who is actually sent into the world as an advocate of the United States in the context of the burgeoning Cold War and as a kind of figure that is supposed to be an example of the glory of the United States.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
And yet, as was often the case, and we saw this in the context of World War I and World War II, even as black people served the nation valiantly, they were subject to deep inequality at home. And so the song actually is able to encapsulate all of those dimensions together. with these rather simple sentences, lyrics that are not directly about all of that, but absolutely are about all of that.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
So you get the sense of innuendo, of multi-layered discourses. It's just so elegant and beautiful and profound.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
I'll just say, you know, I grew up on Nina Simone. My mother loved Nina Simone, and so I've been listening to her literally for my entire 52 years of life. And, you know, we talk a great deal in some ways about the late Nina Simone and the world of sort of popular culture. Nina Simone as a woman who was both...
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
A musical genius and also a person who put politics in their music and also a person who struggled with her mental and emotional health after so many tragedies. And so I wanted to look at the beginning. I wanted to attend to early Nina Simone, a person who had already experienced extraordinary disappointment. She was a trained classical pianist.
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
She'd been denied admission to the Curtis Institute. She was certain that that denial was because of her race. And so she became this musician who was blending, you know, torch songs, show tunes, jazz as a performer, and then elements of the classical music. But she also was really struggling emotionally with the desire to have been a
Fresh Air
What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
a classical musician and the ways in which she was excluded from that. And so there's something about in thinking and talking about this first album, I wanted to gesture to the complex emotions associated with her putting this work together and also its incredible beauty. It's yet again one of these sites where you see