In February, University of California Press is releasing my late husband Bob Blauner’s book Black Lives, White Lives, with a new insightful foreword by Gerald Early, in a re-issue of the original 1989 version.  

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386013/black-lives-white-lives 

 

Here is how it all came about: 

 

In May 2020 – time of a world-wide pandemic and uprisings over George Floyd’s brutal murder by police – literary agent Andrew Blauner* asked me about the status of Black Lives, White Lives. It was out of print, so we suggested to UC Press to re-issue it. Andrew asked Gerald Early, renown Black author, scholar, and culture critic, who accepted to write the new foreword, an astonishing, deep and beautiful essay. And then in 2021, I spent several months shepherding the book’s publication through the steps of re-design of cover and interior, as well as fine-tuning the reframing of the book’s content on the back cover for our current times – 33 years later. 

 

This labor of love felt like a big responsibility – with doubts at times if I could live up to it – and of course ultimately it was a huge honor and privilege. I was not the book’s author, Bob was gone, everyone else busy with their projects ­– and I had to make serious decisions. On small but meaningful details; or had to insist on improvements, choices of words or design. Would I be able to do justice to this monumental study from 1967 to 1988, this beautiful book project? The best possible re-issue was to live on for future generations, lay people, scholars and activists alike. I comb through every word of the gallows, and my eye is on getting the clearest lay-out for the book’s complex content and organization. And all over again I fall in love with the people interviewed in the book, most of them becoming unforgettable characters. Their refreshing honesty, poetic eloquence, the skill of the interviewers evident. Behind it all the curiosity and fierce vision of Bob to show us society’s consciousness in the more conservative times following the sixties. All through ordinary people’s voices. And with it bringing clarity on how divided America has been – and still is. 

 

My Big Thanks to especially Jessica Moll, Senior Production Manager at UC Press, and Lia Tjandra, designer, for their dedicated fabulous work. Gratitude to Michael Burawoy, Beth, Sam, Steve, Michael, and Elizabeth, for answering my questions, giving advice. And most of all, thank you, Andrew, for being the one who ignited the spark, and made it happen with your knowledge. 

 

*Andrew Blauner – no relations with Bob – was the literary agent for Bob’s 1997 anthology Our Mothers’ Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men 

 

Excerpts from Bob’s Introduction to Black Lives, White Lives: 

 

This book is about the racial experience and consciousness of black and white Americans. What is unique about it is the attempt to explore race and racism within the context of people’s lives over the course of almost twenty years, a period spanning three decades each of which has had its own distinctive political and cultural climate. The subjects in this book were interviewed in 1968, again in 1978–79, and for a third time in 1986. The sixteen blacks and twelve whites speak in their own words about how their lives unfolded, how their political beliefs and racial attitudes changed or remained the same, and how they asses the social transformations they have witnessed. 

 

…The people in this book speak in their own words. Originally I had intended a more conventional sociological analysis, written in the third person, but as Julie Lamont, one of our typists, commented on the transcript of Florence Grier’s 1968 interview: “The woman and therefore the interview is magnificent; no words but her own could do her justice.” I had to agree, not only for the very articulate Mrs. Grier but for the others as well.