Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Work of Mourning
This afterword draws together the recent events in Baltimore, Staten Island, and Ferguson, and the larger Black Lives Matter social movement with the treatment given earlier of the Greensboro Massacre and the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For the poet Claudia Rankine, the Black Lives Matter protests represent not simply an effort to mourn the specific deaths of Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown but an “attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture.” If this is the case, then such protests might be both illuminated and informed by the recent experiences in Greensboro and by the idea of a democratic work of mourning. The challenge of the democratic work of mourning is to locate and cultivate spaces and norms of public interaction that might erode some of the projections and pathologies attendant to ongoing relations of misrecognition. It is only from these spaces that feelings of impasse and despair might begin to gradually yield to a sense of democratic agency.