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.
Industry Reviews
"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
"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
