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

A close-up

If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the Contemporary United States.”

People are inclined to use the example of “exceptions to the rule” as evidence that racial inequality doesn’t exist. President Obama is a prime example of this. But what I show is that exceptionalism is in fact a part of the mechanism of racial inequality. “Exceptionals” can be individuals or groups (i.e. role models or model minorities). In the way our culture uses the symbolism of the exceptionals, the access of few actually serves to legitimize the exclusion of many, And of course, the few who have “made it” often have gained that access as a function of some form of advantage: class, color, preferences for particular ethnicities within groups of people of color, elite education. Moreover, those who are exceptionalized don’t necessarily stand as willing or good representatives of the interests of the larger group.

In light of this I describe a practice of “critical exceptionalism” of which I consider myself to be a participant in, whereby individuals who have the benefit of being seen as positive “exceptions” to the rule of their group, use the platform of access and acceptability to illuminate the barriers that exist for many member of the group to which they belong.

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