The Black Studies Program Raquel Albarrán Lecture Spring 2024 Speaker--Professor Juliet Hooker

The  Black Studies Program Raquel Albarrán Lecture Spring 2024 Speaker—Professor Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science, Brown University.

Why Erica Garner Also Couldn’t Breathe: Maternal Grief and Black Politics
What are the costs of black activism? Which citizens are asked to perform the necessary democratic labor to redress racial injustice? This talk, which is drawn from Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton University Press, 2023), explores the key role that political mourning has historically played in Black politics, of which the contemporary M4BL is the latest iteration. The talk highlights the history of black maternal grieving to explore the costs and injustices that accompany the instrumentalization of grieving activism as a democratic resource.