BLACK LIVES, WHITE LIVES:
Three Decades of Race Relations in America
by BOB BLAUNER
with a Foreword by Gerald Early
University of California Press
New edition on sale today
This remarkable collection of oral histories traces three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States.
''A rich and valuable reminder of how limited our progress has been since the late 1960’s." --The New York Times Book Review
"A significant if often discomfiting contribution to our understanding . . . . If this book's interviewees had talked about race less candidly and naturally, if they had qualified their generalizations with the sophisticated caveats now required by polite society, we would be deprived of important insights. . . . In this book, free expression is a virtue, even when the viewpoint is lamentable.” --The Washington Post
"Black Lives, White Lives is a sociological study with a vivid face and a warm heart. Blauner was clearly won over by men and women who shared their lives with him and his readers.” --The Los Angeles Times
“More than a book about race relations, Black Lives, White Lives is a complex tapestry of the hopes and fears, dreams and desires of ordinary blacks and whites over the past 20 years. Blauner goes behind the facades, clichés, and stereotypes to examine the forces which have shaped the lives of these Americans as they struggle to cope with a world of rapid change. A tour de force, certain to become a classic in the field.” --Joyce Ladner, Howard University, author of Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman
“A wonderfully strong and compelling series of narratives, whose many and different voices, in their sum, provide a picture of so many of us Americans—the ironies, complexities, ambiguities which inform our lives. This is one of the finest books I've read in many years an exceptionally moving and thoughtful presentation of ourselves to ourselves, so to speak.” —Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Children of Crisis
Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time, as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's interview subjects—sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white—are expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is today.
Bob Blauner (1929–2016) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author who taught, lectured, consulted, and wrote on race relations. His work was funded by major groups such as the National Institute of Mental Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. His other books include Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry, Racial Oppression in America; Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California's Loyalty Oath; and the anthology Our Mothers’ Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men.
Gerald Early is Chair of African and African-American Studies and Professor of English at Washington University. He has written and edited numerous books, including This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s and The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
Thank you.
Andrew Blauner [no relation]
Blauner Books
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