5/9/2023 0 Comments Imani perry south![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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