Imani Perry

On her book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States

Cover Interview of October 06, 2011

In a nutshell

This book is about a conflict between American ideals and our social reality. Although we embrace the ideal of racial equality, in myriad studies in numerous fields there is abundant evidence that Americans act in ways that disadvantage people of color, and most dramatically African Americans, on the basis of race.

I attempt to provide an explanation for how and why we have this gap between word and deed. What I find, by culling through a huge body of research and analyzing cultural, legal and social realities, is that the “practice of racial inequality,” as I call it, is a cultural practice that is learned broadly through popular narratives, categories, rubrics, and in how we create value.

It is important to note that by and large, racial inequality is not a matter of intentional bias or deliberate animus. In fact, I argue that we are in a “post-intent” age when it comes to racial inequality—meaning that the “intention” to discriminate is not a good measure of the existence of discrimination. Much of the discrimination is unintentional and/or unconscious.

So we must seek solutions that shift racial narratives and develop cultural practices that lead to greater access and full civic and social participation, for communities of people impacted by the practice of racial inequality.

This book also challenges some basic tenets in the study of race. The distinction that is often drawn between individual and structural/institutional racism is a false dichotomy. Structures and institutions are sustained by individuals. Structural racism is nothing more than the cumulative impact of individuals acting to disadvantage others on the basis of race in ways learned through our history and culture. Some of these ways are what is termed in legal studies “facially neutral,” that is to say, race isn’t apparent on the surface, and yet racial inequality is at work.

I also question the ongoing usefulness of the idea of “the other” which has great currency in academic writing about race. We talk about non-white people as being treated as “the other,” but race doesn’t seem to operate in simple binaries any longer, but rather as a spectrum in which members of any group may be within the range of what is deemed as acceptable, or cast out as “extreme.” This evaluation tends to have its own embedded bigotries, but it is not the same as the Enlightenment era good/evil, white/black that we’ve grown accustomed to using as an explanation. Again, new times call for new tools.

philosophy / united states / race / obama barack / racism / cultural theory / social intervention / black studies /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009