Imani Perry Finds Blue in the Black American Experience
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Tickets at Exploratorium.edu slash After Dark. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, Imani Perry says the color blue tells the story of her people, representing both oppression and resilience, sorrow and beauty.

In her new book, Black in Blues, Perry explores the significance of the color in Black history and culture from the indigo trade to the blues music tradition and stitches together histories that connect the color to spirituality, community, resistance, and the complexities of identity. Perry joins us after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

For Imani Perry, the color blue is woven into the Black experience, into Black life, and it performs a dual role. Blue, she writes, has been a word for melancholy in English for centuries. Blue is lovely too. Blue is contrapuntal. It is itself and its opposite, sweet and bitter.

Perry's examination of blue as historical, as personal, and as art opens up a deeper understanding of what it means to be Black in today's world. Her book is called Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Imani Perry is professor of African American Studies and Gender at Harvard and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Professor Perry, welcome to Forum. Thank you for having me. Glad to have you.

You reveal at the outset that your connection to blue is personal. It is the color of the walls and decor inside your grandmother's home. What shade of blue did your grandmother seem to love? So, you know, it's interesting. It was a kind of

medium clear blue but there was part of what I talk about is I had this conversation with my cousin's young son at the time about we both loved blue and I said well what's your favorite color blue Ian and he pointed up and when I looked up at the ceiling I'd seen that there was a tile from where the ceiling had been dropped and

that was missing. And looking through that tile, it was much more brilliant, bright blue than the walls, which had faded over time. And so that, and for me, sort of that opening was like a portal. So it began this process of discovery, which included a delving into a blue that I thought I knew that was actually initially one that was quite different.

So what led her to all that blue? It's a question you ask yourself in the book. What do you think? You know, I don't know. One of the speculations I have is the wildflowers in Alabama, many of which are blue. The beauty of the sky, the clear blue sky when you see, when you look up in Alabama, particularly in the summertime, is

But I also think that there's something that is both for someone who sort of held on to a sense of wonder and beauty, even in what were at times arduous circumstances, it makes perfectly good sense that she would love blue. You know, it's a color that allows you to imagine because you look up or you look out into the waters and it opens up space for

which in the face of moments of being confined can be an extraordinary feeling. Yeah, you do connect the blue to the realities of living in the Jim Crow South, right? So creating this space to dream. So late in your book, you write this, which becomes sort of a powerful thread for everything that I'd already read, almost like a framing of everything I'd already read and was about to read.

You write, how is it that we have kept our hearts and souls reaching? Yeah.

Was that a core part of what you were examining with Black and Blues? Absolutely. I mean, we've been through a season of recent history where there has been lots of important recollection of injuries and injustices and harm. And that's certainly important, but I think in order to actually understand

fully account for people's lives, you have to also attend to the ever-present sense of hope and possibility and joy and love that can coexist with that reality. And for me, it is actually a testament

in many ways to the best of what human beings can be, you know, to still believe that life is worthwhile and life is beautiful, notwithstanding harm and hurt and wound. And so that was a core question. And the answer to the question in some ways is what the book is. But it also is then, I think, I hope at least, for readers, a kind of revelation of something that we all need to be able to attend to,

particularly when we find ourselves in adverse circumstances or having the blues, you know, sort of how do you have, one of the things I say in the book is, you know, we have the blues, but we also have beauty. Yeah.

We're talking with Imani Perry about the color blue, how it's woven into Black history, culture, the Black experience, but also how it reflects the duality of Blackness as well. And listeners, do you think blue tells the story of Black America? Does it tell your story? Are Perry's insights resonating with you? You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on our social channels at KQED Forum, calling us at 866-

733-6786, 866-733-6786. Can you talk about the indigo trade? Sure. Yeah, I mean, so the indigo trade is really interesting, and it becomes a thread almost through the entirety of the book, because indigo was this color that was, you know, turned, came out of, um,

the cultivation of dye out of plants in both Africa and Asia and it captivated the world and people loved indigo and It was one of the things that when European traders on the coast of West Africa wanted to wanted to have access to

And so part of what I did in working on the book is actually go do a kind of deep dive over large swaths of land and over several years, in fact, of how indigo was cultivated, but also the indigo trade. And where I settled down was to think about what was the transition like for someone who had cultivated indigo, who had dyed clothes with indigo, who had made indigo fabrics

was part of their adornment, and then to find themselves in the midst of the transatlantic slave trade suddenly traded for indigo, to go from being a craftsperson or a person who's recognized as a member of society wearing indigo to being seen as roughly equivalent to the value of a block of indigo. And for me, it's a really poignant thing to attend to because on a certain level, that was what...

it was to be counted as black at the dawn of the slave trade. And so I track that reality, this process of people's various cultures and identities being flattened into this category that was meant available for purchase, for non-citizenship. And then...

The shift from that to actually people getting a sense of themselves and personal value and making a beautiful meaning out of blackness. And part of that second movement had everything to do with taking back the meanings of indigo and embracing the beauty of the color and painting porches in indigo and cultivating indigo on their little plots of land, even while enslaved. So it's this shift.

It's this fabric that actually can tell, it's dye rather, that can tell you the story in so many ways. Yeah, in so many ways. And that love for blue and indigo endures despite all of those associations that you describe. Yeah, it's extraordinary. The other thing that's extraordinary is hearing how

Graves of the enslaved were marked with periwinkle flowers. Yeah, yeah. It's so moving to me. So, you know, as I assume most people know or might assume that when enslaved people died, they were not given headstones. Right.

And the way in which, particularly in the Upper South, the way in which people living in communities of enslaved people would mark the grave sites was through planting periwinkle flowers. And it makes sense because they're a hardy flower, so they will be sustained. But I was so moved by this because, one,

part of the process of becoming, you know, black American was actually having one's dead buried in the soil. You know, that's how it's part of how you mark a place that's home. And they found a mechanism for recording presence in this location, even when they weren't being recorded by name in ledgers or certainly in the census. But to be recorded with the presence of flowers, I think is a,

I mean, it's just a remarkable testament to a sense of value that they had in themselves, notwithstanding the message of the larger society.

This love of blue, you say, is also broadly shared. Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be. Why do you think we humans love blue so much? I think it has to do with the sky and the waters. You know, it's connected to these parts of the landscape that are so vast and

And that are both, you know, they're sublime and they're kind of overwhelming in their beauty and they can also be frightening. But I guess I, and part of what I think is really interesting is, and part of what I say in the book is, you know, so everybody loves blue, not everybody loves blackness.

But part of what I am taking great pains to show is that much of the magical thing that we love about blue can actually be found in the stories of black life.

And so sort of in traveling through the connections, you know, the extraordinary, you know, the power of will, the imagination, the sense of possibility, the creation of beauty, all those things that intoxicate us when we find them with the blue are evident in this tradition and perhaps most dramatically in giving a sound to the world's favorite color with blues music.

Yeah, I definitely want to get into this more and we are coming up on a break. But do talk about, you know, you really take time to think about

so many things related to music, blues music, the musical blue note. As I say, we're about to go into break, but just give us a little bit of an overview of the connection to that word and that sound. Sure. I mean, you know, the blue note is in the Western musical scales, the worried note, the note with the sound between notes, the slurred note. And it's the gift of, you know, Africans to American music and Western music in general.

But it also is important because it's the foundation of American music writ large. So there's something very poignant and pointed about that fact that the sound and the blues itself, you know, you can't really trace a form of American music that doesn't owe something to the blues as a genre. And so there's a power in that, of course, but I think it's

in the recognition that that which came of people who had been most reviled actually provides a foundation to the sounds that the world loves is really, really instructive about how we need to pay attention differently. Hmm.

We're talking with Imani Perry. Imani Perry is Harvard professor in studies of women, gender, and sexuality, and in African and African-American studies. A 2023 MacArthur Fellow, her previous book is South to America, which won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction. We're talking about her new book, Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Hi, I'm Bianca Taylor. I'm the host of KQED's daily news podcast, The Latest. Powered by our award-winning newsroom, The Latest keeps you in the know because it updates all day long. It's trusted local news in real time on your schedule. Look for The Latest from KQED wherever you get your podcasts and stay connected to all things Bay Area in 20 minutes or less.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the color blue this hour, its significance in the Black experience and Black life and art and history. And we're talking about it with Imani Perry, who has written a new book called Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Do you connect listeners with the idea of blue as the story of Black America? Does it tell your story? Is there a color that you consider woven in the fabric of your experience or community? What questions would you like to ask? And if so,

Professor Perry, or are Perry's insights resonating with you? You can find us on our social channels on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and others at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org.

And Lubov writes, my porch bedroom has a blue ceiling. After 133 years, I continue to paint that wonderful sky blue. Blue was thought to keep bugs away. It might be because of the short wavelength reflected, but it is so lovely and traditional. Let me go to caller Barry in San Francisco. Hi, Barry, you're on.

Hi, Mina. Thanks for letting me call in. Professor Perry, it's wonderful to hear you speak of your book, and I look forward to reading it. But I wanted to share with you, I was born and raised in Ireland, although I live here in San Francisco. And in the Gaelic language, to describe a black person, it's to say, which basically is,

the blue person. When you talk about a man, you say, "An fargurum." When you talk about a woman, you say, "An van gurum." And this use within the Gaelic language predates the notion of whiteness and blackness and racial differentiation. You probably know this already from your work, but I just wanted to speak to it because it's when I've done some research myself on where that comes from, to say literally,

A black person in Gaelic is to say, But Irish language historically has not used that to describe a black person. They've said,

And I just wanted to share that with you. Thanks for sharing, Barry. And yes, you do talk about the history of

being called blue, predating blackness. Yeah, but I absolutely loved hearing it in Gaelic, which I hadn't before. And I think that there's something... I also love that last bit about...

as a descriptive of the way light hits the skin. Because, of course, that's not a racial designation. That's a sort of observation, right? And I do take great pains to point out that

And we talk about all the time race is socially constructed, right, that race didn't always exist. But I feel like people don't actually, it doesn't sink in. And so part of what I tried to show is there are all these various designations. And it wasn't clear to what part of the world people were referring. And that even the concept of Africa is something that's imposed externally. And so that it's this process of becoming something, right?

that wasn't actually chosen and then though making something meaningful out of that which wasn't chosen and creating something extraordinary and even beautiful out of something that wasn't chosen

I think that's really important because it's a testament to actually what human beings can do, the kind of depth and breadth of the human capacity. So, yeah, so all of that to say, I just, I really appreciate that comment. Yeah, thank you, Barry. We were talking about music before the break, and even what you were just talking about is making me think of the things you write about the blue note in jazz. Can you describe the blue note, the sound, the role of it?

Yeah, I mean, I wish I had a good singing voice because I would do it with my voice. But one of the examples I give in the book is actually the way Aretha Franklin moves up the scale in the song Chain of Fools because you can hear this sort of sliding between, particularly for people who actually sort of know the sound of notes, you can hear the slide between the notes. It's sort of kind of traveling and it sounds almost circular, higher and higher and this beautiful elision of,

And part of what I think is interesting is that, you know, it's seen as the outlier in the Western scales, but now people are talking about blues scales where it's actually in the center of the sound of the music. So it's funny to describe it because if you know the genres of music, you absolutely know it when you hear it, right? It's familiar. It's central to Black American music, which the entire world virtually listens to.

So there's also some lesson in that, too, you know, that you may not know how to name it, but we definitely have heard it. It's familiar. The Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue, is one of many musical references in your book. What do you think Davis was trying to say with that album and title? Oh, well, I mean, I think on one level, it is...

There's a citation to the blues tradition. And the blues, you know, it's so funny because genres of music are, they're different, they're distinguished by their style, but often they slide into each other. And of course, jazz is dependent upon the forms of blues music.

And what Miles is doing on that album is sort of, he paid homage to the traditional forms, and he's in the previous album. And in this one, he's really pushing the boundaries of sound and form, and I think that it is

it's significant that it coincides with the sort of dawning days of the civil rights movement, that there is this sense of possibility that exists both amongst people who are pushing the boundaries of Jim Crow and also people who are trying to push boundaries artistically. And there's always, sort of always the case, there's a connection between art

and the artistic imagination and the political imagination. So it's just this beautiful example, and also one that is sort of harrowing because right after the album is released, he is beaten by police officers. And it also gives you that sense of this kind of recurring dream and deferral to borrow language from Langston Hughes in black American life.

Yeah, you recap that story. To start your chapter, The Boys in Blue, how Davis was beaten by a cop in New York City. And again, just the duality of the role that blue plays in the black American experience. Could you talk about, you know, also what you think about

the blue uniform. You talk about it, of course, as being the enforcement uniform, right? Yeah. Of the state. Well, first you talk about that. Yeah. I mean, so what I, there's a, I,

tell the story first of the boys in blue meaning Union soldiers in the Civil War and that the power of seeing the blue uniforms as sort of liberators but also the power of wearing the blue uniforms for enslaved black, enslaved and free black men to don these you these blue uniforms to free themselves and to save the nation. It's this extraordinary historical moment and

But then after this Civil War, and then certainly, you know, the blue uniforms begin to be used in various locations as police uniforms because there are lots of them, right? And...

part of what I wanted to show is that, you know, we talk about Reconstruction and then after Reconstruction, there's this betrayal of the promises of citizenship and full membership in the society for Black Americans. And you get a sort of institutionalization of Jim Crow in the South, but also other forms of like structural inequality in other parts of the country. And I tell some stories. And

in other parts of the country and also in other parts of the world. But when you have that kind of dynamic of people being seen as inferior, then of course the forces of policing change.

are going to be in a difficult relationship, to say the least, with that community. So this story of tension between police forces and African Americans is not the more recent story that we know. You know, there's more, you know, last 10, 20 years, we've talked a lot about it, but it has deeper roots. And the deeper roots have to do with the history of inequality that was actually structured and enforced. And so...

That transition, that betrayal of the promises of the Civil War and Reconstruction, I see this sort of history of this tension with police forces as actually having a root there. So that Civil War and immediately post-Civil War period is very important. It's key and in many ways devastating in terms of what it failed to do for black Americans.

We're talking with Imani Perry about our new book, Black and Blues, which stitches together histories that connect the color to community, resistance, spirituality, identity, and opens up a deeper understanding of what it means to be black today. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your reflections on blue and

The Reflections on the Idea of Blue is the Story of Black America. And with your questions and comments for Imani Perry, the email address is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky and other social channels at KQED Forum, and you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Judd writes, Yeah.

Yeah, you talk about it.

The blues are this source of connection to Africa and African origin. And for Murray, the blues are part of what marks African-Americans as quintessentially American and having more to do with other Americans than anything particularly African. And so I think there's something marvelous about the fact these two incredibly brilliant musicians

thinkers actually have somewhat opposing visions. They both agree that the blues are incredibly important, but they don't agree on how and why. And that's partially because, you know, the writers, I will say us writers, we're always trying to chase the musicians because the heights

of the black musical tradition are so extraordinary so we need it's almost like we need to sort of use the musicians to justify the arguments that we have and so um so yeah and i don't mean that to diminish i you know i love that uh love all of their work because i think it's really smart but it's also it's interesting you know how key the blues actually are for all of us

Casey on Discord writes, among my favorite jazz standards is Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo. Ellington's description of the meaning of the song has always stuck with me. Go ahead, Imani. No, I mean, Ellington is in the book, although I talk more about Crescendo and Blue as opposed to Mood Indigo. But

Yeah, I mean, you know, I love that kind of response because I just think we have all these reference points. I mean, everybody has them that get excited once you start thinking about this. So it's like, okay, let's just train our eyes on this tradition and this trajectory. And then people are like, oh, yes. And that's what I hope for, that the book resonates and then takes people, you know, people go in their own directions with this.

with the associations. There's something you say and bring up a lot in the book. This idea of art is something we bring into our lives to transform it. At another point, you write, to transform and transpose the world our ancestors faced to reclaim the beauty of the sky and the water and the indigo from the moving crypts without ever disappearing.

forgetting the disaster. I connected that with other things that you said, like when you talked about the writers and you just mentioned writers, that the page was where they could make the world what they hoped it would be. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Talk about, you know, that idea of remaking, um,

through this process of your examination of the role of blue? Yeah, thank you. That's such a beautifully stated question. I mean, part of what has stuck in my head is...

You know, the fine art and documentarian photographer Dawoud Bey, I remember him answering a question of a young person in an audience at some event, and he talked about, you know, the role of art is actually the way that it transforms your life. And so to come from this tradition where art as a sort of everyday practice, particularly music and dance, but sound as an everyday practice, it is...

It's almost too small, it's too trivial to refer to it as resistance. It's actually transforming the substance of your life. And it's bringing moments of joy and meaning to your life as a way of living. And I think that it's not, you know, it's almost...

There's no way I think we can overstate how profound it was for people, you know, place in abject conditions to keep creating beauty and for themselves. So now we talk about, we think of music, we think of record companies and selling it and careers. But the root of it was just exist everyday life.

And so, and expressing the range of emotions and having lots of metaphor and symbol in the midst of it.

And so for me, that was really important to capture because even though the blues takes its name from sort of melancholy and sorrowful content of some of its songs, it's also a joyful musical genre. As Murray used to say, you know, you play the blues to get over the blues, right? That it has this cathartic effect upon listeners and players. And so...

Yeah, I just, you know, to me, that is a lesson for the ages about how to live. Can you talk about the painting on the cover of Black and Blues? Yeah, it's a painting by my friend Titus Kafar. It's absolutely breathtaking in person. It's called Seeing Through Time. And one of the things that Titus often does with his work is that he will...

you know, take the frames or the context of classic painting, 18th century, 19th century surroundings, and then either have cutouts or somehow, or doors that move to the side, and then there's an opening or a way to get access to it. And that is, it becomes a way to bring sort of a contemporary black gaze into that space,

or frame of reference and to access the black people who are traditionally in those images, but often in very kind of off to the side or in the shadows and the like. So the painting is literally that. Here's a contemporary black woman with blue cornrows who is seeing through time to the

past. And it resonated so much with me because that's part of what I take my work to be doing. I am trying, I often say, to haunt the past. And by that, I mean, I want to go back in time and pay attention in different ways than the records that we have of that time usually do. I want to go back in time and engage ethically with the past.

draw our eyes here as opposed to there. So one way of telling the story, just to go back to something we were talking about earlier, is, oh, there were no headstones in the graveyard. And another way to say it is,

periwinkle flowers mark the sites of the enslaved who died. And that the shift in that, including that second part to me, is a way to do something ethical with what was. Yeah. The other thing that was so striking as you talk about the image of a modern Black woman looking through time is it's like through the cutout of what we can assume is the form of a European, maybe white European person. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Shifting the gaze. Yeah. Shifting the gaze. We're talking with Imani Perry about our new book, Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. And we'll have more with her and with you listeners right after the break. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim. ♪

Coming up tomorrow on Forum, Rick Steves is one of the most trusted sources for Americans traveling abroad. But he once dreamed of becoming a piano teacher. That was before backpacking the hippie trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu in 1978, which inspired Steves to enable others to experience life-altering travel. We'll talk to him about his new memoir called On the Hippie Trail, about a life spent away from home. What would you like to ask or tell Rick Steves? Join us.

Listen to past Forum shows by going to Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search KQED Forum. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Imani Perry, professor of gender and African American studies at Harvard, and also the author of a new book, Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. You may know Perry from her previous book, South to America, which won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction literature.

So we were talking about the transformative power of writing, but you often say, I'm a reader first. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I say I'm a reader first because it is, in some sense, sort of the, you know, it's the most consistent habit in my life. I love books. I love delving into others' imaginations. I love the act of generosity that writers have to offer their ideas

you know, their perspective, uh, and put it in their imaginations and to allow me to journey inside it. So it came about, I started saying that because someone, um, asked, asked me, well, what is the book? If you could have written it, you'd want to have written. And I said, none, because I want to be a relationship with them as readers, right? I just, I don't, I love the fact that I'm able to encounter, um, the work of others and, um,

I think good writers read, but I also just, I'm so consistently enthralled by how much incredible writing is out there. Yeah. At one point you say, as long as I can read, I can teach myself to do anything in the book. Yeah, my uncle Cornelius says that, and I just love that formulation. Yeah, he means it too. He teaches himself how to do all kinds of things. Yeah.

I have to say, I was so moved. I don't know why. I was really moved by the chapter on the blueback speller and the lengths that enslaved people would go to to get it. Could you describe the blueback speller? Sure. So Noah Webster basically created this reading guide, and it was literally blue. I have one, like a little blue notebook book.

And he wrote it in such a way that autodidacts could use it, right? You didn't need a classroom necessarily to learn to read and spell from it and write. And this book was seen as just the most precious book

item to possess, the most precious possession for people who were enslaved and then even later who had been enslaved, their descendants. Because of course, you know, reading was prohibited in most of the enslaved South and it could be, if you learn to read, it's punishable.

by death or maiming. And so reading was seen as part of the pathway to becoming a free person. So to have a book that

that you could use to teach yourself to read was just, I mean, it was just, it was magical. And so, you know, people like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, these sort of storied figures all tell these stories of these blue back spellers. And I just, you know, I just loved, it's incredibly moving. You know, this idea, the preciousness of knowledge, right?

in the most humble of circumstances. Yeah, it's great stories. How much is revealed in the fact that it's prohibited because it would, in the eyes of the enslavers, make them unsuitable for servitude. Yeah, yeah.

And then, you know, you talk about, yes, Booker T. Washington and how you say it really was a key that really opened up for him the vision of black formal education. And I couldn't help it as I was reading that chapter wonder what you thought of Booker T. Washington. Yeah. You know, the so-called accommodationist, right, who did not insist on full rights for black people.

Yeah. So I, you know, I should say as a full disclosure, much of my family was educated at Tuskegee University. So when I got to, you know, when I got to college and the way people talked about Tuskegee, I was thinking, oh, that's not my experience. You know, Tuskegee brought my family into the middle class. Tuskegee made engineers and doctors and all these folks in my family. And so, yeah.

I think Washington is a complicated figure, much more complex than he's often accounted for. He built an institution that has endured. He was centrally involved in bringing elementary school education throughout the U.S. South. It's his relationship with the Rosenwald Fund and the

Clinton Calloway, who ran the Extension School at Tuskegee, they built models for these schoolhouses that proliferated and actually sent out students to build these schoolhouses all over the South.

And he was I think the greatest issue with Washington was there. He was wielded power unethically at various moments, you know, and and really punished people. He was the most powerful black person in the United States. He punished people for disagreeing with his argument that you should focus on economic development and possession of land. And it.

you know, as opposed to thinking. And it's important to say that there are many people who agreed with that. They just didn't think that was possible with that also having full access to rights and also didn't think that that's the only way to approach, you know, that the most thinkers of that time period had this kind of mixed method sense of struggling for black freedom. But again,

But I'm more tender to Washington than many of my peers, although Du Bois is sort of my, as my kids say, the person I want to be. So I guess between the two, I'm more aligned with Du Bois, who was his chief opponent. But yeah, you know, he was an extraordinary man despite those flaws. Yeah. And you really do like looking at

flaws or just at what makes people human, right? Yeah, really. And even the way that you describe writing this book, you talk about it as a quilting of stories and sort of revealing and witnessing, because I do think we learn so much when we do step back and just try to take it all in.

This listener writes, I love writers who come forward as readers first. It's key and real to say that your ideas don't just come out of nowhere. You're consciously in dialogue with so much. Is that what it felt like, feels like? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I, you know, I think...

Part of what I love about jazz in particular, and I think informally speaking, a lot of what I'm trying to do in this book in terms of how it's composed is jazz informed. But part of what I love about that musical form is that it is so citational like it.

You know the quotation and I talked about several songs that do this in this book But also in previous books the citation of a previous song or the playing in a way that is informed by another artist but then you put your own spin on it or the replaying of standards and then making them different that kind of You know I have what I don't even know what the right word but a kind of genuflection before tradition and a constant acknowledgement of

of the roots of how you came to be as an artist, I just think it's so beautiful. So yes, absolutely. You know, we don't come from nowhere. We come from somewhere. And a lot of people put in work for us to become who we are. Yes. And earlier, as we were talking about

you know, how is it that we've kept our hearts and souls reaching? I feel like that's such a critical question for this moment, right? Absolutely, yeah. The Trump administration has set out to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and even this morning seemed to suggest that diversity at the FAA played a role in that terrible situation.

midair collision near Reagan National Airport that is believed to have killed all 64 people. And we're just seeing so many incredible examples of things that are trying to be rolled back or perverted that were gains that were made by the civil rights movement from, you know, the Pentagon pausing observances of Black History Month and MLK's birthday and Holocaust Days of Remembrance and Pride and Juneteenth and, you know, Trump firing

Democratic commissioners on the EEOC. I just, I wonder, you know, what you, how you are thinking about approaching this time, where you, where you draw strength from? Yeah. I mean, you spoke, it's a very hard time. I think part of my approach is

to keep in mind that all of these ideals, it's all being sort of executed or pursued in a distinct way. There's a lot of imagination that gets applied to intolerance and exclusion.

But these are not new ideas. And we have people who came before who endured them at their nastiest expression. And so we have to have a kind of humility to think back to traditions of not just enduring, but working around them. And I also think there's just this really important to be

honest and clear about what our values are, what our commitments are, right? This idea that, you know, there hasn't, diversity is the opposite of a meritocracy. Well, we know that's not true because we see all of these appointments of people who are wholly unqualified right now, right? You know, this idea that there are certain people who should be presumed to be competent and others who are presumed to be incompetent.

Do that, you know, we have to be very explicit. Are those values when people raise that? Are those your values? Do you really believe that? And how can those values be consistent with the proclamations of a faith like Christianity, for example? And so, you know, it's...

There's a lot in the tradition and the history that I can draw strength from, but it still is an incredibly distressing time. We need each other in order, and not to sort of just huddle up in our private worlds, but actually forge deeper connections with others in order to not just endure it, but bring ourselves out on the other side, you know, hopefully in a better place.

This user on Discord writes, thank you for the interview of Imani Perry, using colors to express our life experiences. Imani Perry is a professor in studies of women, gender, and sexuality, and in African and African American studies at Harvard, and you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. So we've got more questions about music from our listeners. One of them writes,

I've always been struck by the album cover of Nina Simone's Pastel Blues. Also thinking of her song, Backlash Blues off her album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues. You, of course, have a connection to Nina Simone. Do you want to respond to this listener and talk about that connection? Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I've spent, I literally have been listening to Nina Simone my whole life. My mother loved Nina Simone and played her albums when I was in infancy. And,

And I'll say one of the things that I talk about in the book, I don't talk about those two albums, but I think they're beautiful examples. But part of what I talk about in the book is, you know, the story of Nina Simone's in which she, um, she was trained as a classical pianist and she, uh,

was devastated as a young adult when she applied for admission to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and was denied admission. And she was, you know, really believed she was denied admission because of her race.

And so she develops this career as a kind of, you know, as playing in a club, but does it sort of secretly. And then she'd play in the club and then she'd go back to her home and sort of play classical composition so she didn't lose it. But the combination of this sort of jazz and blues and show tunes and torch songs is what produces the Nina Simone we love. And so I think of her as someone, she turns to the blues as in some ways,

because that's what she can make money at. But also, it then becomes this kind of expressive terrain about frustration, but also showcasing her extraordinary brilliance to create her own form, in a sense. And so I, you know, one of the things that I hope the book does is, you know, I don't, I want it to, I never want to, you know,

you know, try to push aside the hurt or the pain. But I want to show how people still did such amazing things in the face of that, alongside it. You know, she had lots of struggles in her later years. She was devastated by all the deaths that happened during the movement. And yet she still kept making all of this important work.

So she, you know, becomes in some ways, maybe not, maybe the word isn't model, but she's an exemplar of something that is incredibly powerful in the African American tradition. Yeah. Can you talk about the role that hoodoo plays in creating culture?

As, you know, terrain for creating new forms as well, or just new ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I mean, for folks, someone told me the other day that I need to explain hoodoo because not everybody's familiar with this Black Southern culture. And I said, okay, yes. But it's sort of like, it's a folk, a set of folk spiritual slash medicinal things.

slash kind of ritualistic practices. So there's people cast spells with hoodoo. They figure out ways to protect themselves with hoodoo. They figure out ways to maintain health and ward off infections and all these sorts of things. So it's eclectic. It's almost like a grab bag of lots of different pieces of knowledge that work together in order to

to navigate the world. And the color blue is really important in hoodoo. I would argue that it's the most important color and lots of historic hoodoo formula for various things require bluestone, which turned out to be a toxic chemical. And so people stopped using bluestone, but then they just started using laundry bluing instead of bluestone. And laundry bluing is that

powder that makes clothes whiter for people who, you know, don't do old timey things the way I do. But, but, so laundry, so that let me know that the color blue was important because

But also once you start paying attention to sort of hoodoo culture, you see it, first of all, it's all over the blues. But it's also in lots of daily practices, like the painting of a porch, a ceiling light blue to ward off malicious spirits or forms of protection. That it is, you know, it's everywhere. And lots and lots of blues musicians of the early and mid-20th century would talk about

you know, being hoodooed or having spells cast on them as they are struggling with the difficult emotions of a lost love or an unrequited love and the like. Yeah, so, and it's, the eclecticism to me is part of what makes it so beautiful. Yes, you describe hoodoo, yeah.

As a form of study that lies outside of imperial norms. Yes. Right. Because it doesn't have, you know, unlike, you know, religions or laws or it doesn't have formal codes of like what counts and what doesn't count and being recognized by governments and being written in ways that are like that are definitive that it's

It's like a grab bag of knowledge that people carry around and trade. It takes, you know, it has West African elements. It has Native American elements. It has European elements. You know, it's sort of whatever was whatever resourceful people in need of managing a difficult environment added things to that collection.

Yes, it's a testament, you say, to the resourcefulness, right, in the face of so very much. And there are just so many reminders of that in this, and I just really appreciate you talking about them with our listeners today, Imani. It was really, really wonderful. Thank you. It was a great conversation. Imani Perry's new book is Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Thank you, listeners, for sharing your reflections on this.

Blue, the blues, so much of the role that blue plays in the story of black America. And thank you, Mark Nieto, for producing today's segment. You have been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Chain of blue. Chain, chain, chain.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.