South to America Quotes

“Acting like you know everything and acting like you don't know how to be respectful will keep you ignorant. Be humble.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“just hope it’s still living then. The trees don’t know your race or your gender identity or your sexuality. The trees don’t expel you”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“While the South lost the Civil War technically, White Southerners did not in fact lose the war substantively. After all, Jim Crow, convict labor, and lynching happened with near total impunity, and African Americans experienced decades of pernicious neglect from the federal courts and government. Exploitation ran amok. Inequality persists. And the nation turning a refusing eye, allowing the Southerners to work out their own business over the lives of Black people on the land of the Indigenous all across the region, gave the South their victory lap.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“And yes, slavery was abolished, Jim Crow is over, but the prisons, the persistence of poverty, are constant reminders of how the past made the present.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“There are no historic firsts, no grand gestures, no monuments or museums that undo generations of exclusions under law, policy, and practice, or that stop the expulsion. It makes me want to holler. Tell the truth. What is this symbolic republic?”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“How many times will you witness people being starved, or worked to death, driven out of their homelands, the land blasted and lives destroyed, and be only quietly horrified? When will you finally be repulsed enough to throw a wrench in the works? When will you allow curiosity and integrity to tip over into urgency? I’m asking you, I’m asking myself to dig deep enough for the truth to flood in.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“Among us, there are citizens, second-class citizens, noncitizens, and those who are cast so far beneath every other category that it is as though they are seen as nonpersons. Although these habits are not all directly about race, race remains the most dramatic light switch of the country and its sorting. And yet “racism,” despite all evidence of its ubiquity, is still commonly described as “belonging” to the South. I don’t just mean that other regions ignore their racism and poverty and project them onto the South, although that is certainly true. I also mean that the cruelest labor of sustaining the racial-class order was historically placed upon the South. Its legacy of racism then is of course bloodier than most. But other regions are also bloody in deed. Discrimination is everywhere, but collectively the country has leeched off the racialized exploitation of the South while also denying it.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“We are in awe at the sublime natural landscape and then use up its abundance into oblivion. We are primed to be destroyers with a disregard for the moral, human, and environmental costs of it all.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“From the beginning, this nation was experimental and innovative as well as invasive. Resourceful even. But any virtues were distorted by a greater driver: unapologetic greed, which legitimized violent conquest and captivity. This is the American habitus.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“I prayed against the cruel violence of dominion and diminishment. And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves. That God is far more tender than the one she praises, even to women like her.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“prayed against the cruel violence of dominion and diminishment. And armed with the belief in things unseen and miracles alike, I prayed she might be swayed to love the God of slaves. That God is far more tender than the one she praises, even to women like her.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“On the one hand, the White Northerner often seeks to find sympathy and common ground with the White Southerner by disappearing the Black Southerner. On the other, the White Northerner seeks to express solidarity with the Black Southerner by turning the White Southerner into a caricatured demon in comparison to his own virtue.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“When the crop that brought wealth under the banner of Christianity is found to destroy human lungs but trees older than Jesus breathe, it makes me think the meek shall inherit the earth.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“The driver's gentility, despite the fact that he could have, could still, string me up without the world flinching? That toothless smile that could easily accompany either mirth or murderousness, depending on the eyes? This is what Black folks mean when we say we prefer the Southern White person's honest racism to the Northern liberal's subterfuge. It is not physically more benign, or more dependable. But it is transparent in the way it terrorizes. You never forget to have your shoulders hitched up a little and taut, even (and especially) when they call you 'sweetheart.' Cold comfort.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“So I went deeper into an archive of historical memory, hoping to sort it out”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“What, by analogy, happens to the family of the university, or the town, or the state, or the Old Dominion, or the nation itself, given what has been built into its creation?”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“My advisor in graduate school, Henry Louis Gates Jr., known as Skip, wrote about coming of age in a West Virginia mountain town in his memoir, Colored People. Like Albert Murray, he”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“sneer about it with my designer shoes and Ivy League pedigree.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation