When you ask people what color they love, the number one answer all over the world is blue.

Evolution might drive that preference. Something deep within us knows a flash of blue on a landscape might

indicate the presence of the water we need to survive. But blue also has fascinating, contradictory

cultural meanings, especially when you look at the links between this color and black identity.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

From free and then enslaved people cultivating indigo to the counterintuitive joy to be found in blues music,

to the Blue Lives Matter rhetoric used to deflate Black Lives Matter advocacy,

my guest has long collected accounts of how blue has shaped black existence for centuries.

Imani Perry is a national book award winner. She is a Henry A. Morse Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morse

Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard.

Also a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her newest book is called Black in

Blues, How a Color tells the Story of My People. Eamani, welcome back to think. Thank you so much

for having me. As a black woman, you write that you always understood. You were part of a group

for whom the word color had special significance.

Do you remember when you started noticing the particular resonance of the color blue?

You know, I don't remember.

I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is my grandmother's bedroom being the color blue,

which is, you know, in some ways, my first home. And so I was

surrounded by blue from birth, frankly. So it's sort of, it's, it's been a color that is a

familiar from, from as far back as I can remember. I had not realized that in the Middle Ages,

English people might have referred to the people we now call black as blue.

Why blue?

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