Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience

As an African American cultural anthropologist and CEO of an urban research institute, D.B. Maroon is intimately involved with the nation’s struggle to realize its promises equally for all people. Her work is to put those stories into the big picture of American culture—past, present, and future. Intersectional, personal, and hard-hitting in places, while ultimately centering on truth, love and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love weaves the stories of America’s pursuits with Maroon’s own experiences. The result is a personal biography of America offered from the thoughtful viewpoint of a Black anthropologist. The essays take on some of the country’s fiercest debates and most profound challenges with an unflinching style: from the invention of race and debates about the 1619 project, to the rippling impacts of resurgent White Nationalism, the birth of Black Lives Matter Movement, and the ongoing traumas of police brutality. Yet within its pages is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, the striving for better, the grappling with the hurt in order to soothe it with love, and to heal it with peace. Black Lives, American Love is arelentless truth-telling about America’s failures to its Black population—yet itis also a discussion on how we might all do more to secure America’s still vastlybeautiful possibilities of liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all rather than afew.