Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience

by D.B. Maroon

Overview

"An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America" — Kirkus Reviews

In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country’s fiercest debates and most profound challenges.
 
From the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement to the murders of unarmed Black people, this essay collection invites readers to ask questions as much as it asks for accountability. Moving through debates on the 1619 Project to the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, as well as a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconciliation.
 
Intersectional, personal, and ultimately centered on truth, love, and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love details and tends to the fractures in American culture. It is a meditation on how we can all do more to secure America’s vastly beautiful possibilities for all its citizens, rather than a few.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641609326
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

D.B. Maroon is an expert on American culture, an anthropologist, and CEO of an urban research institute. Her essays have been published in The Themed Space: Locating Culture,Nation, and Self and Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity. A committed public scholar, she's appeared in Bustle, Shape, Healthline, and Women's Health. She holds a PhD in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

1 Black Lives: Truth Telling
2 Hope and Rage
3 Sun Jumping
4 An Agape Village
5 The Great Gentrification
6 Representation
7 Mahicantuk: An Ever Giving River
8 Creating Blackness
9 Black Space
10 Black Spectrums
11 Lil’ Bit uh Luck
12 Firekeepers
13 Black ’n’ Blue: On State Violence
14 9/11: 2001–2021
15 Real Talk
16 Movements After May
17 The United States of America: Origin Stories
18 American Love
Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"D. B. Maroon deftly encapsulates the personal and political meanings of America's racial conflicts from past to present. She shows us the painful intimacies of America's racial violence, the nation's strides to equitable peace, and how we can all negotiate the precarious space between. In Black Lives, American Love, we witness a gifted writer sharing stories of truth as she walks the maze of America's fault lines. And in the stories these powerful essays present, we see ourselves." —Mike Ladd, musician, creator of Welcome to the After Future and co-composer for Netflix’s Transatlantic score

"With the lyricism of a poet, the penetrating discernment of a historian, and the keen social vision of an ethnographer, D. B. Maroon has delivered a set of essays that are stunning in their musicality and erudition in equal measure. This is anthropology of and for the future: an alchemical transmutation of the rage and grief that accompany the author’s unflinching explorations of anti-Black violence—from personal biography to COVID-era professional experiences to popular media discourse—into a call to love that is utterly convincing in its ferocity and scope. Black Lives, American Love is a book that everyone needs to read, to share, to teach." —Dr. Megan Moodie, author of We Were Adivasis

"Black Lives, American Love grips you with its powerful opening and holds with its urgent narrative. D. B. Maroon's personal stories complement her prolific reporting on American culture and its layered truths of racial inequality and the struggle for social justice. This book should be required reading for everyone who cares about the intersection of history and contemporary American life." —Sharrif Simmons, author of Clearly Spoken, Spoken Clearly: Sober Poems in a Drunk World

"D. B. Maroon’s honesty, like those of her generation, is brutal. She takes no shelter unveiling the mechanisms that keep Black and Brown lives in search of breath, of flight, of freedom. What we learn and carry in our blood, what we overcome as women, as Americans, D. B Maroon dissects, thus presenting a new talking 'fabric' aligned with her literary ancestors Hurston, Lorde, Morrison, and hooks. This book is a gift for the now and for generations long after us.  She is becoming the sun." —LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, author of Village and TwERK

"An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America" — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2023-08-09
Explorations of Black selfhood and community-building.

Maroon, a cultural anthropologist and CEO of an urban research institute, explores the status of Black identities in America and the possibilities that exist for cultivating redemptive love. In a series of essays, the author mixes personal reflections with a scholarly view of broader social realities as he takes on a series of pressing topics, including the social construction of race, the politics of the 1619 Project, and the origins and consequences of police brutality. At its best, Maroon’s writing is engaging in its reckoning with the complexities of Black experience. In “Mahicantuk: An Ever Giving River,” the author subtly argues for the significance of questioning dominant cultural narratives—and of recovering buried histories—in order to live authentically in the present. “Creating Blackness” and “Black Spectrums” provide insightful commentary on the urgency of—and inevitable difficulties involved in—constructing a racial self linked to community and tradition. In “Hope and Rage,” one of the most memorable essays, Maroon poignantly recounts her involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement and confrontations with astonishingly virulent prejudices in her community. “The density of hate, the volume of anger, dazed me,” she writes. “It felt like falling through a time hole and turning up in the jarring black-and-white footage of civil rights protestors being swarmed by hysterical anti-Black crowds.” The most personal and moving essay, “American Love,” vigorously affirms the author’s journey to self-acceptance as the necessary foundation of loving others properly. Though much of the collection highlights the suffering inflicted by historical and contemporary injustices, what stands out most vividly is Maroon’s conviction that, with the proper effort and encouragement, enough of America will “continue to embody the best of agape kindness” and make possible greater collective understanding and healing.

An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America.

Kirkus Reviews