Events & Calendars President’s Colloquium on Race and Racism: A Conversation with Imani Perry and Anthony Jack '07

The President’s Colloquium on Race and Racism, a series of conversations with nationally renowned scholars studying the intersections of race and American democracy, debuts with a conversation between Imani Perry and Anthony Jack ’07.

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jazz Studies. Anthony Jack ’07 is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

IMANI PERRY is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jazz Studies. She is the author of six books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by The New York Times and an honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society Paul Murray Book Prize. Her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem was the winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American studies and the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Her most recent book is Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies and an author of creative nonfiction. She earned her Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an L.L.M. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Yale College in literature and American studies. Her writing and scholarship focus primarily on the history of Black thought, art and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained. Her book Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Duke University Press 2018) is a work of critical theory that contends with the formation of modern patriarchy at the dawn of capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest, and traces it through to the contemporary hypermedia neoliberal age. Her book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (NYU Press, 2011) is an examination of contemporary practices of racial inequality that are sustained and extended through a broad matrix of cultural habits despite formal declarations of racial equality.

Perry’s forthcoming book under contract with ECCO Press is a narrative journey through the South, arguing that it is the nation’s heartland for better and worse. Future planned projects include an examination of African American theories of law and justice, and a meditation on the color blue in Black life.

ANTHONY ABRAHAM JACK ’07 received his B.A. in women’s and gender studies and religion cum laude from Amherst College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He is an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He holds the Shutzer assistant professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Sociological Forum and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and Society for the Study of Social Problems. Tony has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. In 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in transforming higher education.

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, The National Review, The Washington Post, Vice, Vox, and NPR have featured his research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, was awarded the 2020 Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, the 2019 CEP Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize and was also named a finalist for the 2019 C. Wright Mills Award and an NPR Books Best Book of 2019.