“Blue” has been one of the last colors to receive a name in nearly every culture, perhaps because of its rare occurrence in nature; there is no true blue pigment (the sky and ocean appear “blue” to us as a result of how the various colors travel through and are reflected on the light spectrum), and plants can only produce it through the manipulation of other pigments, most often red. “Blue” was not prevalent in human societies until the advent of manufacturing and industrialization—now it polls as the most popular color in the world. Though it may be a recent phenomenon, it has accumulated much meaning as a descriptor, becoming a shorthand for things like masculinity or melancholy. (“Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body,” the novelist and philosopher William H. Gass wrote in On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry; “it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed.”)
Of course, these are overly simplistic summaries—of the colors themselves, of the ideas they express, and I’ve barely touched the ways in which they have become intertwined. That is the work Imani Perry set out for herself with her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, the follow-up to her 2022 National Book Award–winner, South to America. Perry’s idea, as the title suggests, is that there is such a rich connection between Black people and “blue” that it’s possible to look across time at various pieces of art and artifacts, literal and metaphorical blues, and come away with a narrative of Black people, one that points back to Rafaz’s question—“What did I do to be so black and blue?”
The beats of Perry’s story are not unfamiliar; Black in Blues does not position itself as revisionist. What’s compelling, when and where Perry peers inside of the familiar, through her black and blue lens, to provide us new ways of looking at it, is that the two concepts have become inseparable. “Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be,” she writes. “But everybody doesn’t love Black—many have hated it—and that is inhumane. If you don’t already, I will make you love it with my blues song.”
It feels only natural to begin an exploration of the relationship between “black” and “blue” with blues music—the backbone of U.S. popular music, a ready-made metaphor for the Black American experience. Amiri Baraka christened us a “blues people,” after all. And Perry gets to this well-trodden territory, but not without first winding us through a more ambitious historical project.