Race in the U.S.: Is the South More Racist Than the North?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR:  Next, the power of education is essential in combatting the culture wars. And award-winning author, Imani Perry’s latest book “South to America”, explores the divide between the northern and southern states. She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how the book can help us work through the tensions of today.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Professor Imani Perry, welcome to the show.

IMANI PERRY, AUTHOR, “SOUTH TO AMERICA”: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: So, you were raised in Birmingham. That’s your hometown. Birmingham may be the most southern of all cities. I think you’ve got a lot of cities in here that vie for that title. But tell me, why did you decide you had go back to the south to understand what’s happening to America today?

PERRY: Yes. Thank you for that question. I was born in Birmingham and actually raised in Massachusetts and went back and forth my whole life. And so, I lived with this kind of intense sense that people had stuck Birmingham back in 1963. And yet, for me it was home, it was this living beautiful place. And I think that that’s actually characteristic of how the south is understood. You know, it is — it’s frozen. It’s often depicted with all of these stereotypes as a place that is backwards and particularly racist and violent, and all of these depictions that actually confuse us as to the centrality of the south in the national culture and also, the way that it shapes our doings and the way it — in many ways, it’s the cutting edge. And so, you know, we have these cycles of political conflict and tension, and I think going to the south actually helps us understand who we are as a nation.

ISAACSON: Do you think the south is more racist than the north having live in the both places?

PERRY: No. Absolutely not. I think the difference is that there’s a palpability to the history of race and racial violence, right, and slavery in the south, and it partially is a result of the intimacy that exists across the color line, right? That there — people are up close each other. We talk to each other, we occupy the same space in ways that are very different. I think we forget, you know, there’s actually more segregation in many northern cities. So, you know, you can’t avoid the landscape. You know, I move through this landscape, and you can’t avoid what happened in the past in the south. And so, you know, there’s an awareness of the politics of race in a very immediate way, but I don’t think it’s more racist. In fact, I think the south, as the origin point of the country, has guided the rest of us on — you know, when we’re in these various places about what race is. It set the tone, as it were, which is part of why you have to go there to, I think, address race and racism.

ISAACSON: Let’s talk about your own story. And we start with the most amazing character in the book, your grandmother. Who I think you say is the smartest person you ever knew.

PERRY: Absolutely.

ISAACSON: And she never went to college, but had 12 kids that went to college, right?

PERRY: Yes.

ISAACSON: So, tell me about her.

PERRY: Yes. I mean, my grandmother, you know, she read the paper every day. She was resilient and resourceful. So, she figured out how to get 12 children coming out of Bombingham, coming out of the segregated south to college. And she had this kind of diligence and incredible dignity and curiosity and also a defiant disposition. You know, we learned self-regard from her. We learned rituals that sit — that were an assertion that we were of value. We learned the ability to speak up when we felt that we were being treated unfairly. And so, I have often said, and I mean this with every fiber of my being, that she is at the center of all the intellectual work that I do, of all of my work as a writer, because I am looking through the lens of her life as someone who was a domestic, as someone who was born in the Rural South, as someone who figured out how to make wonderful things happen for her children. That’s — you know, that’s my model and that’s my way of viewing and understanding the world. You know, she’s — so, she’s at the center of it all.

ISAACSON: And your mother became, among other things, a political activist both here and New Orleans and other places. Tell me about her.

PERRY: I would say — so, my mother is incredibly cerebral. She is a reader and a thinker and a passionate intellectual. She devoted her life to not just to the social movement, but being an educator. So, she has — she’s retired now, still she has so many mentees. And her journey, including in New Orleans, having been a (INAUDIBLE) in the sisters of the Holy Sisters Family and then, going to become a political organizer in Birmingham and Milwaukee and so forth is about finding meaning, right? So, I learned from her the sense that one’s life is supposed to be meaningful and you’re supposed to dedicate your intellect and your energy and your resources to making the world a better place. And so, she’s very much my grandmother’s child and very much someone who set the stage for my life as well.

ISAACSON: Do you worry about what’s happening both in the south and how that’s affecting the rest of the nation where there seems to be a backlash against the progress we have had?

PERRY: I don’t know how much it’s sort of, like, progress and retrenchment. It’s the dance. It’s always — we’re always in this tug of war, this back and forth between sort of the values to be completely, you know, blunt about it, the values of a slave society and the ideals of democracy and liberty, right? This is a repeated cycle that we are in — you know, that we are at tension with it, and that’s where we started, right? We started with this gorgeous landscape, this vast array of human beings, and also, with the social order that excluded many, if not most of them. So, we keep — we’re in that moment again, and it is a struggle that must continue. And so, I’m always concerned. But I also believe in the vision of the beloved community, and that is the thing that sort of makes me think — we continue to invest in it, right? And say, we’re still here, right? We’re here notwithstanding all of the things that could have taken us out, and I’m speaking specifically about black folks, but also poor folks. Everybody who was among the suffering, who put their labor, you know, to this place and didn’t get that much in return, we’re still here.

ISAACSON: You say you’re talking about black folks, also poor folks. Do you feel there’s almost a bond among southerners, white and black, that they understand each other from having lived so close in proximity?

PERRY: Oh, absolutely. There’s an intimacy. There’s a bond. You know, I — and I talk about this at many points in the book, right, one moment I’m riding around in a lift, right, a ride share, you know, with a man, a white man whose elderly who has been — who spent 30 years in the mines, right. And so, deep in the mines laboring and is now making a living with the sort of piecemeal work of driving folks around. And being able to see him and also know that there is a tension there, right? Because race did structure social relations, but I also can see him, right? I can understand something about his journey. It’s a point of great potential, right? Because if we can transcend the ideologies of race and superiority and inferiority, the ideas, that intimacy has great power, and it continues to exist, and even though the resistance to it continues to exist. So, that’s part of — you know, that is part of the struggle.

ISAACSON: Let me read a beautiful passage from your book, which was, at moments of crisis, it always makes sense to return to the past to try to figure out if the arrangement of what is remembered and what is forgotten or what is retained and what has been thrown away are part of the problem.

PERRY: Yes.

ISAACSON: How can this book help us understand how we can work through the tensions today?

PERRY: Well, you know, it’s a hope. You know, I always think about history in this way, right? History is composed of thousands of facts, right? It’s like mapmaking. So, there’s this concept in mapmaking, (INAUDIBLE) paradox. If you put everything on the map, the map is too big. You can’t use it, right? So, history has its uses. We make choices. And I think — so, to me, the challenge is to make choices to attend to that which is usually neglected, to be honest and not mythological. And so, what I’m trying to do is move us somewhat in that direction with the hope that if we are attendant to different people and places, perhaps we will be moved to act more tenderly and just and kind, right? And so, you know, I think, we don’t talk about history in that way enough, but it’s absolutely true. We place our attention and care where we decide that things matter. And I think the human condition matters.

ISAACSON: Among the places you visited was Harper’s Ferry.

PERRY: Yes.

ISAACSON: You even met a confederate reenactor, somebody reenacting things there. Tell me, how did you — what did you make of somebody doing confederate reenacting?

PERRY: So, I will say this, you know, I couldn’t — it was frustrating to me. I was like, why does this person want to be a confederate? But I also – – what resonated with me is that he wanted to be inside history. And we were the same in that way. You know, he was an archivist. He volunteers at Harper’s Ferry. And also, we went through all of the sort — the rituals of reenactment, which are complex. And it is a form of play acting, right. But it’s also a way to live in the connection to the past, and I’m engaged in the same process. And so — you know, I made of it that, you know, we are shaped by our histories, and we — you know, there’s something useful about being aware of it. But I also — and this was a big — this was perhaps the biggest point for me is, I realized slowly that Maryland is the south through him, because he was part of the Maryland regiment. And I just had never really thought of it in that way. And that was part of the discovery of the book.

ISAACSON: When Plessy v. Ferguson was ruled in the late 1800s, suddenly, there’s a color line that gets drawn, and that color line had not been so sharp, especially in places like New Orleans, before that. There was a lot of moving back and forth. Tell me what you think historically that meant to the south and meant to the nation, and could it have been otherwise?

PERRY: So, it absolutely could have been otherwise, right? There are — there were places — I mean, New Orleans is one, but also Wilmington North Carolina, where there were — you know, that emerged in the post emancipation context as places where there could be a multiracial democracy. They were few, but there were possibilities. You know, what Plessy did is it formally instituted a structure of racial hierarchy, right, which was — because there was so much intimacy between black and white folks in the south, it might have — you know, the more you opened up the society didn’t have rules about where people could be, there was no longer the slave/free distinction, something else might have emerged, right? There was a lot of resistance, of course, to emancipation and to black participation in civic life, but something could have emerged. I also think Plessy is significant because, you know, creoles in New Orleans who didn’t necessarily identify themselves with black people, although had, you know, black ancestry, African ancestry made a political decision in the committee (INAUDIBLE) and organizing around Plessy to politically identify with black Americans in general and to see themselves as a collective force. And I think that’s an interesting piece, too, because post Plessy, in this incredibly difficult period in American history, black Americans organized politically across cultural differences. And there are cultures, plural, right, black cultures in the south in extraordinary ways and built civic associations and built schools and built kind of a public life behind the veil to borrow language from the voice (ph) of race. And so, it was both a devastating period but an extraordinary period.

ISAACSON: In your book about — you know, when you get to New Orleans near the end, you say it’s — people saying, “it’s the most European of our cities.” And then, you say it’s also the most African of our cities. And then, you also conclude it’s the most American of our cities. Explain this complex layering that you found there.

PERRY: Right. Well, this is again a point about a place, you know, where you walk through and history is ever present, and the history of this place is all of those things. You know, it is indigenous, it is European, it is African, it is the encounter. You can’t move through the city without being very aware of the cycles of immigration, migration, forced migration. And that is the story of the nation, right? So, you know, sometimes when people say, OK, well, the heartland is in the center of the country, and I just — I resist that because I can see what happened. The whole story of what happened in New Orleans. You know, the — as a port city, as a place people left from, it’s a place connected to the Caribbean, it’s a place that people, you know, came and went in cycles. It’s there, right, all of it. And so, the United States is European, indigenous, African, increasingly Asian, you know, Latin American, and that’s who’s in New Orleans, right? And that’s where you — that’s what you move through in New Orleans.

ISAACSON: You make a final stop in the book, Houston, because you’re going back to see where George Floyd had been killed, murdered in Minneapolis, but he’s a southerner from Houston. You want to go back and see there, and you say, it brought me back to the place where I first began. Meaning, where I where I first began with this book. How so? Why was it important to end understanding what happened around — what had happened to George Floyd and what it had wrought?

PERRY: Yes. Well, it was — you know, there’s something very powerful about how in the midst of the pandemic that the entire world was quiet and listened to George Floyd’s screams. And that that is, in some sense, a kind of a sound that has this sort of the foundational terror in this country for black people. It’s not as though going north was an escape, right? It was actually the site — a site where violence could chase you to. And I was thinking a lot about Houston as, again, one of these incredibly cosmopolitan cities as the path way out to the West Coast, you know, the I- 10, taking the I-10, and the way in which he tried to run from what it was, but what it was is what it is, right, and, you know, they — it was harrowing and it was also beautiful the way that the world responded. It was a moment — there was a moment of hope there. And so, you know, those moments are hope of what we hold onto.

ISAACSON: Professor Imani Perry, thank you so much for joining us.

PERRY: Thank you for having me.