Mourning in America

Recent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but this text argues that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourning—its relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities. The book addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. The book offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Greek tragedy, and scholarly discourses on truth and reconciliation. This book connects these literatures to ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice, and it contextualizes Black Lives Matter in the broader politics of grief and recognition. The text also examines recent, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes such as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004–006), which provided a public examination of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979—a deadly incident involving local members of the Communist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Politics of Mourning in America

This chapter begins with a discussion of an event that came to be known as the Greensboro Massacre. On November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klansmen disrupted a scheduled rally in a black public-housing neighborhood planned by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Violent confrontations between the demonstrators and white supremacists resulted in the death of five CWP members and activists. It is argued that Greensboro dramatizes the full range of what could be described as the politics of mourning. The chapter then turns to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC), a grassroots-organized TRC that operated in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 2004 to 2006. The GTRC marked the creation of public space for dialogue and deliberation about a painful event in the city's history and the complicated pathways between that event and the present life of the community. The GTRC, when contextualized within a democratic theory of mourning, can provide a model for similar means and mechanisms of responding to the frustrations, blockages, and confusions within our con temporary politics of grief.

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.