A new book tries to reset the debate about Black Lives Matter.

In the time of 18th-century slavery, British abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood (grandfather to Charles Darwin) created the anti-slavery slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” In 1968, black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, organized a strike against abuses bearing placards that simply read: “I Am a Man.”

It’s easy to see a lineage to “Black Lives Matter.” But people have tried to hijack it, countering “Blue Lives Matter,” or demurring to “All Lives Matter.”

Abiodun Oyewole, a poet, teacher and founding member of The Last Poets, offers a restorative with a collection of essays, poems and stories from 79 contributors. It’s called Black Lives Have Always Mattered.

In it, Yael Kenan, a doctoral candidate of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, uses the writings of poet Claudia Rankine (the focus of the Steinbeck Center’s recent Big Read campaign) to discuss mourning in the black community. Tim Wood, a poet and professor of English at SUNY in Garden City, New York, turned in a poem about Chicago police erasing Burger King video footage of their 2014 shooting and killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. And Michael Reid, a retired Episcopal priest who is black and lives in Monterey, shared his account of racial discrimination in India with his husband Bill, who is white. Racism, Reid observes, runs deeper than even homophobia. His piece is titled “Skin.” On. Oct. 27, he joins a discussion of the book at CSUMB.

In an email, Reid writes, “My experience as a Caribbean American whose Jamaican mother (dark) and father (light) had vastly different skin tones, provided me with a very personal entré into this unfortunate phenomenon here and abroad.” Those kinds of notions turn a simple declaration like “Black Lives Matter” into a vital matter of reflection.

MICHAEL REID and others read, sign and talk 4-6pm Friday, Oct. 27, at CSUMB Alumni and Visitors Center, Gen. Jim Moore Boulevard and Inter-Garrison Road, Seaside. Free. 582-5500.