Sublime
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Behind Atlanta’s shine, whether we are talking about social media, the spectacles of pop culture, elegant fine dining, global corporations, or icy diamonds dripping from necks, there are myriad stories and relationships. We know that intuitively, often shaming the artifice in our midst. But I’d like to think, more specifically, that Atlanta makes
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
In some ways the annual rehearsal of the Seminole Wars is analogous to the Confederate reenactments. In both, the population honors their foreparents who fought valiantly and lost but also won. Although the Seminole are an unconquered people, their land was stolen again and again. Their current economic victory hinges upon the sovereignty of Indian
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Eatonville was the first incorporated Black town in the United States. It was established in 1887 by freedpeople who, through collective purchases, established and advertised their town as a place of possibility for African Americans. They built wood-frame houses, schools, and a municipal government. It provided a refuge from the violence just
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Living in the southern part of France, where there is more sun than water, it is rare to meet a frog on a menu. He thrives in the damp, mates in his pond, spends his moist life in a temperate climate. The chances of finding him in a Provençal kitchen are remote. So when I decided to test the truth of the old chestnut—“Actually, it tastes like
... See morePeter Mayle • French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew (Vintage Departures)
Atlanta is over 50 percent Black, it is luminous with Black celebrity and iconography, but the unbearable Whiteness of its being—and by that I mean a very old social order grown up from plantation economies into global corporations—still leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable. No matter how it might look, Atlanta still comes out white as snow.
Imani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
making life seem as full and new and fresh as the promise of Pennsylvania had once been for so many of those standing about who had come up from the South to the North, a land of supposed good, clean freedom, where a man could be a man and a woman could be a woman, instead of the reality where they now stood, a tight cluster of homes enclosed by
... See moreJames McBride • The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

Thus the famous opposition between fats – butter versus olive oil – is not just a matter of north and south, but also a matter of social distinctions.