Know Your Price

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The deliberate devaluation of Blacks and their communities has had very real, far-reaching, and negative economic and social effects. An enduring white supremacist myth claims brutal conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people’s collective choices and moral failings. “That’s just how they are” or “there’s really no excuse”: we’ve all heard those not so subtle digs.

But there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve. We haven’t known how much the country will gain by properly valuing homes and businesses, family structures, voters, and school districts in Black neighborhoods. And we need to know.

Noted educator, journalist, and scholar Andre Perry takes readers on a tour of six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. Perry begins in his hometown of Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh that, unlike its much larger neighbor, is struggling and failing to attract new jobs and industry. Bringing his own personal story of growing up in Black-majority Wilkinsburg, Perry also spotlights five others where he has deep connections: Detroit, Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. He provides an intimate look at the assets that should be of greater value to residents—and that can be if they demand it.

Perry provides a new means of determining the value of Black communities. Rejecting policies shaped by flawed perspectives of the past and present, it gives fresh insights on the historical effects of racism and provides a new value paradigm to limit them in the future.

Know Your Price demonstrates the worth of Black people’s intrinsic personal strengths, real property, and traditional institutions. These assets are a means of empowerment and, as Perry argues in this provocative and very personal book, are what we need to know and understand to build Black prosperity.

Know Your Price Tour

Andre Perry will be participating in Know Your Price events in cities across the country.

• May 19: Know Your Price book launch
• June 3: Know Your Price Chicago, hosted by the Chicago Community Trust
• June 5: Know Your Price Boston, hosted by the Boston Foundation
• June 11: Know Your Price Pittsburgh, hosted by the Heinz Endowments
• June 12: Know Your Price Atlanta, hosted by World Within
• July 1: Valuing Black Lives: Understanding Racism in American Education, Housing and Policing, hosted by the Schott Foundation
• July 22: Know Your Price Milwaukee, hosted by Radio Milwaukee
• August 7: Know Your Price Tulsa, hosted by Fulton Street Books
• August 13: Know Your Price Minneapolis, hosted by Center for Economic Inclusion
• August 18: Know Your Price Detroit, hosted by Urban Consulate

Praise for Know Your Price

“In this groundbreaking and important volume, Andre Perry brilliantly addresses the importance of fixing the racist governmental policies that have ‘created housing, education, and wealth disparities,’ especially in Black communities. Not only a rigorous analysis of the dynamics of devaluation, Perry has written a powerful personal narrative that will captivate his readers.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“Black women have long known how to build and grow community despite others’ negative perceptions of value. This book illustrates beautifully for the rest of the world how perceived value and gendered racism in policies is killing us.”
—Alexis McGill Johnson, co-founder, Perception Institute; acting CEO, Planned Parenthood

“Know Your Price is a purposeful, in-depth, and critical examination of the pathology of racism, classism, and the self-destructive impact of American indifference. But what Dr. Perry so skillfully illuminates is the culture of exercising our right of self-determination that has served generations of African Americans as a means of survival in the face of the most virulent, violent, and discriminatory social order. Know Your Price brings solutions to the table, not merely voicing dissent to the status quo. It’s a gift of understanding that the one variable a person controls in a dysfunctional paradigm is their contribution to it, without absolving those who are the source of that dysfunction. Personal, powerful, and profound, Know Your Price is a display of Dr. Perry’s brilliant analytical mind as a researcher, and the heart of a man who speaks with the passion and intimate knowledge of the world he creates in this book.”
—Wendell Pierce, actor, producer, activist

“Birmingham understands that developing trust in communities that have been historically discriminated against requires time, energy and partnership. As mayor, I work in the building where the city’s red-lining maps were once drawn. This book calls on city leaders to think and act systematically to begin dismantling systemic racism. In Birmingham, we are working for economic justice and racial inclusion because of our history, not in spite of it.”
—Randall L. Woodfin, mayor, Birmingham, Alabama

“In a book grounded in both personal testimony and rigorous empirical research, Perry writes compellingly about how Black folks have managed to navigate the systemic and structural impediments history has placed before us. Perry outlines in extraordinary detail what Black folks have been up against over the course of generations to help the reader understand that the contemporary landscape of inequality is no accident, but exist by design. Know Your Price is an important addition to any conversation about racial inequality in this country. This book is an essential tool to help refute the lies we have been told for so long.”
—Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent

“In Know Your Price Dr. Perry lays bare the wretched tradition that devalues black bodies and black property. By writing from the inside out, he gives the facts and figures of redlining and subsequent gentrification, names and faces—their joys, desires, hopes, pain, agony, and despair. The writing itself is deft and heartfelt. It reads as if James Baldwin was a social scientist. Indeed, Dr. Perry has a word for our beleaguered democracy.”
—Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, associate fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

“A powerful indictment of a white culture that persistently blames the victims of racism for the consequences of oppression, Know Your Price is also a hopeful and moving celebration of Black resilience. Its meticulously researched case for better scholarship and an end to racist policy should be must-reading for American policymakers and the people who put them in office.”
—Grant Oliphant, president, The Heinz Endowments

“This memoir is not another self-aggrandizing voyeuristic presentation of hood triumph. Rather it is a brave, honest, and analytically insightful understanding of dignity and worth and challenge to society’s myopic devaluation of black people and communities. This book is one of a kind and Andre Perry is a national treasure. In both persona and scholarship, he exemplifies the clear and convincing case of why diversity and inclusion matter.”
—Darrick Hamilton, executive director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; professor, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

“At its core, Perry’s work and research is very personal, intimate and familial, because it’s for and about Black people, and his life experience has made him exceptionally sensitive and conversant in the patterns of socioeconomic disparity—but what he’s doing is also a public service for the common good.”
—Carla Bell, Essence

“Perry reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly, and even apologizes along the way for falling short of what he’s now challenging others to do—to see and understand black lives and black places as inherently worthy of investment.”
—Oscar Perry Abello, NextCity

“VERDICT Especially for students of urban planning and public policy but also for those seriously interested in equity and social change in America, this work combines extraordinarily readable, well-documented data analysis with a people-oriented call for activism.”
—Library Journal

“The book is powerful and moving; the stories of his childhood in Wilkinsburg, PA, and the medical struggles he and his wife faced are both searing and illuminating. But Perry also delivers the kinds of facts, figures and charts that one would expect from a Brookings Institution fellow.”
—Peter Greene, Forbes

“The book is an obvious choice for courses in urban studies and racial inequality, but also (e)valuation and economics. Perry effectively highlights the value of Black communities while acknowledging the systematic disinvestment and structural racism that have devalued them.”
—Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana, Social Force

“Andre M. Perry’s Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities reveals the web of historical and contemporary socioeconomic barriers that maintain the racial wealth divide and does this through personal narrative, history, and an exploration of a wide array of social issues.”
—Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Shelterforce

“A bracing look at the systemic devaluation of black property and a rousing call to empower majority-black communities to build wealth through asset-based development.”
—Anthony M. Barr, The American Conservative

Andre Perry is a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on race and structural inequality, education, and economic inclusion. Prior to his work at Brookings, Perry has been a founding dean, professor, award-winning journalist, and activist in the field of education.