Born just nine years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Among many other awards and accolades, Dr. Perry is the winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction, for her most recent book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Dr. Perry’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications.
Read Dr. Perry's full biography here.
Dr. Perry's latest book, National Book Award-winner South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is a narrative journey through the American South, positioning it as the heart of the American experiment for better and worse. In looking at the South through a historic, personal, and anecdotal lens, Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A “rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America” (Publishers Weekly), South by America defies classification. In her New York Times book review, Tayari Jones writes, “Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which straddles genre, kicks down the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages with literary criticism and flits from journalism to memoir to academic writing—well, that’s a fool’s errand and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and moving project…. An essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even Americanness itself…. This work—and I use the term for both Perry’s labor and its fruit — is determined to provoke a return to the other legacy of the South, the ever-urgent struggle toward freedom.” South to America was named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, and Oprah Daily, and longlisted for the 2023 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
Dr. Perry's book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Conceived as a letter to her young sons, this “uplifting and often lyrical meditation on living” (Booklist, starred review) offers compassion, dignity, and resilience as a balm to all Black children facing a world rife with racial hatred. As The New York Times noted, “Breathe is a parent’s unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children’s right simply to be possible.” The book was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is a revealing biography of one of the most gifted and charismatic—yet least understood—Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Although best-known for her seminal work A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature with an unflinching commitment to social justice. Looking for Lorraine paints a “richly dimensional portrait” (Booklist, starred review) of the artist contending with exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. As Library Journal noted in their starred review, “a must-read for fans of black and queer history, literary, biography, and women’s history.” A 2018 notable book by the New York Times, the book received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for Outstanding Work in Literary Scholarship; and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, among other honors.
The Freedom School sessions offered during the Racial Equity Summit are based on the model of the Freedom Schools created during the Civil Rights-era. The Freedom Schools of the 1960s were first developed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and were intended to serve as an answer to the “sharecropper education” received by many African American students and poor whites. Freedom School curriculum was progressive, and designed to empower attendees to act politically and civically on their own behalf. Learn more about the history of Freedom Schools here.
Racial Equity Summit Freedom School sessions will be led by Seattle University faculty and staff, and include a range of topics. Attendees will be able to select up to two different sessions through the course of the event. Further information regarding the offered sessions will be shared in the coming weeks.
Racial Equity Summit – a LIFT SU initiative – is a university-wide convening and is an opportunity to gather as a learning community with focused attention to deepen understanding and build collaborative capacity to pursue antiracist education at Seattle University. Through the summit, we co-create community and imagine an inclusive and equitable future we can build together as an innovative and progressive Jesuit and Catholic university.
The summit offers a platform for collective experience to reflect and deepen understanding of systemic racism, as well as to elevate, connect, and activate around LIFT SU and commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion more broadly.
For Context
LIFT SU was announced in October 2020. The “LIFT Off” Stakeholder Convening was held in December 2020. The meeting was a cross-functional university gathering of faculty, staff, students, and representative governing bodies. It served as the beginning dialog toward coordinating an intentional process for operationalizing LIFT SU and engaging in a university-wide conversation.
The inaugural Racial Equity Summit was held in the spring of 2021 -- a four-hour virtual summit was attended by more than 1,000 members of our community and reflected our Jesuit mission and values through music, art, reflection, and analysis of our SU context. You can view the first racial equity summit here with your Seattle University credentials.
This year’s summit will be in-person under the theme of “Freedom Dreaming.”
Vision
The vision is for a collective experience – a time to take in together the significance of this consequential year, reflect on what we are learning, and position us to operationalize LIFT SU through a systematic and strategic process.
It is meant to be more than a “moment,” catalyzing a movement to affirm, ally, and activate towards action.
Goals
The summit aims to be more than a “moment,” but a catalyst to affirm, ally, and activate towards action for anti-racist education at SU, and stronger inclusivity for students, faculty, and staff.
Broadly speaking, the goals are as follows:
Affirm:
Ally:
Action
No. Mission Day and Racial Equity Summit are biannual events, each being held every other year.
While not a substitute for the Mission Day program, the Racial Equity Summit offers a dedicated forum for the university to come together and focus attention on the very critical matters of systemic and structural racism, its material impacts on a range of intersectional experiences as we generate the path forward to make Seattle University a more welcoming, inclusive, and anti-racist university aligned with Reigniting our Strategic Directions Goal 4 Promoting Inclusive Excellence. These goals are consistent with our Jesuit mission and values, and our aspiration to be one of the most innovative and progressive Jesuit and Catholic universities. Like Mission Day, the Racial Equity Summit is about building community and growth around shared goals.