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.
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Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Imani Perry, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America- A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Looking for Lorraine- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons, Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb. Connect with her on Twitter (@imaniperry).
“Breathe is a parent’s unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma
and love, for her children’s right simply to be possible.”
—The New York Times
“In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a
painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion
call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the
promise of the next generation.”
—Stacey Abrams, founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc.
“Breathe: A Letter to My Sons is deeply cathartic and resonant for
parents attempting to raise their children with intention and
integrity. Imani Perry shows deep compassion for both parents and
children while incisively underlining the realities of raising
Black boys in a country that will inherently betray them. It is a
book filled with love and insight for difficult times.”
—Tarana Burke
“Breathe is what is says it is, a letter from a mother to her sons,
but it is more than that. It’s a meditation on child-rearing,
world-building, fire-starting, and peace-building. Imani Perry
combines rigor and heart, and the result is a magic mirror showing
us who we are, how we got here, and who we may become.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
“A masterfully poetic and intimate work that anchors mothering
within the long-standing tradition of black resistance and
resourcefulness.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“This mother’s striking and generous admonition to thrive even in
the face of white mendacity also is a meditation on parenting.
Reflective insights about injustice adjoin a few visceral apologies
about every responsible parent’s regrets, which might remind
parents of the divide between ‘the deed of giving life’ and ‘the
social consequence of the deed.’ For Black boys and their parents
who struggle to get childhood and mothering-along or
fathering-along correct: ‘Just always remember: even if you tumble
. . . you must move towards freedom.’”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“Perry’s uplifting and often lyrical meditation on living invites
readers to delve into their self and particularly into the
complicated categories of mother, parent, African American, and
human. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“To read Imani Perry’s new book, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, as
an African American mother of a teenage son is both an excruciating
and exhilarating experience . . . . It is so startling and apt and
timely that you will likely devour it the way a swimmer takes a
giant gulp of air as she cracks the surface of the water—greedily
and gratefully . . . . That Perry can navigate so seamlessly
between interiority and the interrogation of American culture is
astonishing. There’s something so tender and vulnerable about
Perry’s voice here, yet I would not call it ‘raw.’ It’s refined and
honed, each word burnished and given to us with care, as a
hand-carved, African sculpture might be bestowed by its creator;
it’s a loving gesture, this book, mindful of its recipient . . . .
To be clear, we’ve never seen a book like this before.”
—Women’s Review of Books
“With Breathe, Dr. Perry departs from her previous academic works
and presents a resolute call for courage, compassion, and hope by,
and for, her boys. In doing so, she has penned the most important
book of her career.”
—Ms. Magazine
“Perry urges her sons to hold history but not be hindered by it.
She is determined that the dissonance that accompanies growing up
young and Black in this country is not destiny. This book is an
honest examination of the contradictions that make us whole and
human. Breathe is a love letter to and about us all.”
—Phillip Agnew, codirector of The Dream Defenders
“Beautifully written with brilliant insights that leap off the
page, Breathe announces the arrival of Imani Perry as a literary
force. With each sentence, Perry reveals her mastery of the genre
of the essay and her vast knowledge of the tradition of African
American letters. From that deep well, she offers her wisdom not
only to her sons but for all of us. This is a must-read—especially
in these dark times.”
—Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
“Imani Perry wants her young sons ‘to make beauty and love in a
genocidal time.’ Bless them! And bless her, for this book is a
wonderful model for doing just that! So much joy and caring and
pain and rage distilled into soaring, striking sentences.”
—Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana
“Breathe is a masterpiece. With an approach that is at once
vulnerable and brave, scholarly and artistic, critical and hopeful,
Imani Perry has written the book that we desperately need. Breathe
arms us with the wisdom, courage, and hope necessary to parent
Black children within a White supremacist
world. Breathe not only demonstrates Perry’s deep love of
her sons but also her profound and abiding faith in the rich
traditions, ambitious freedom dreams, and boundless possibilities
of Black people. This is an offering of profound beauty and
brilliance that marks Imani Perry’s emergence as the leading writer
and thinker of this generation.”
—Marc Lamont Hill
“Before reading Breathe, I knew that Imani Perry was the most
important cultural worker in my professional life. But I had no
idea that Imani Perry, or any writer in this country, could pull
off what she pulls off in Breathe. More than any book I’ve read in
the last twenty years, Breathe boldly reminds us that artful
intentionality is not nearly as important as artful effectiveness,
and artful effectiveness is shaped by the love a writer has for her
intended audience. Somehow, Perry manages to mourn, celebrate,
theorize, and welcome us into the space between, and around, this
Black mother and her Black sons. Though the language here is
different from all of Perry’s other work, the attentiveness to
sustained analysis is even more apparent. One feels that Perry had
to write her other five books to write this one, the smallest and
ironically the most rigorous, personal, and soulful of all of her
genius work. Breathe is the first book I’ve ever needed to read out
loud with my mother.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“There are moments when a piece of writing is so honest, so
personal, that it crawls into us. Moments when words attach
themselves to instances in our pasts, visions of our futures, or
the purgatorial questions of today. Breathe is that. Perry gives us
a look into what it means to love her children—her Black sons—in a
world that may not. What it means to arm them with information,
history, culture, spirit, pride, and joy. What it means to
celebrate with them the vastness of their lineage and the tight
network of community, which affords them an impenetrable freedom to
be. To just . . . be. And as Perry gives this to her sons—her
family—with such candor and respect, I couldn’t help but hear my
own mother speaking her truth, our truth, to me.”
—Jason Reynolds, Newbury Award honoree and author of the Track
series, Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu
“Breathe is at once a resplendent meditation on the labor and art
of parenting and on the ‘special calling’ of mothering Black boys
in America. By turns fierce and loving, intimate and erudite, and
drawing with deep complexity on her Catholic theology and
spirituality, Imani Perry interweaves the most universal of dreams
and desires with the particular traumas of our world of ‘wild-eyed’
whiteness. In so doing she offers her sons—and all the rest of us,
and our sons and daughters—a vision of human resilience and
wholeness that could reframe and redeem this young century’s
painful reckonings.”
—Krista Tippett, founder and CEO, The On Being Project, and
curator, The Civil Conversations Project
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