PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Brown University political scientist Juliet Hooker has long explored racial justice, Black political thought and contemporary political theory in her scholarship. Her newest book, “Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss,” explores key moments in U.S. racial politics that expose the range of grief and grievance associated with political loss.

Hooker asserts that Black grief and white grievance are two of the key forces driving racial politics in America.

“In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side,” said Hooker, a professor of political science whose research has drawn connections between racial justice movements throughout the Americas. “But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally.”

Hooker’s book examines the idea that some view the United States as a white country under siege — while others experience repeated losses that are expected to propel social change, as in the public mourning and protests following incidents of Black death and suffering.

“Whites [as a group] are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it,” Hooker wrote. “Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice.” 

In early December, Hooker discussed her book in Pembroke Hall on Brown’s campus as part of an event series hosted by the University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. The following passages are excerpted from her talk, which was moderated by Assistant Professor of History Emily A. Owens.

On how the book took shape…

I started writing the book after the Ferguson, [Missouri], uprising [a series of protests that began in August 2014 after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black 18-year-old, by a police officer]. Many of us were [responding] in that moment to the militarized and heavy-handed response to the Black grief and anger that was pouring out on the streets of Ferguson. And then, of course, I kept on writing because books take a long time to finish.

Then, in 2016, the Trump campaign got into high gear with the racism, xenophobia [and] misogyny that was so central to that moment. It made me think about how white grievance — right at that moment, backlash was happening at the same time as this incredible mobilization for racial justice — it made me think about how we needed to think about these things together, that they were happening simultaneously, and they were both, in some ways, responses to the perceptions of or the reality of loss.

On incorporating poetry into the text of the book…

I was thinking about questions such as: How do you make loss visible? What does that mean in terms of what can you show? What do you have the right to try to depict? And when are words not enough? One of the ways I tried to deal with that was by turning to poetry. So, there are a number of interludes in the text. Some of them are images, but a lot of them are poems, and I think they help to capture some of the things that I didn’t feel like I could capture in a standard social science writing style.

For example, there’s a beautiful poem in the book called “A Small Needful Fact,” by Ross Gay, where he talks about how Eric Garner [a Black man who was killed by a police officer in Staten Island, New York, in 2014] worked for the parks and recreation department in New York City, and so he planted flowers, and it gives us a different image of Garner [than the viral one of him being choked to death]. This idea became a thread throughout my reading of thinkers Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells, of how in their work, they pay attention to the small needful facts that tell things about a life beyond how someone died or was killed.

On responsibility and the work of activists…

Often, if you look at the activists, particularly Black activists who take up the work of racial justice, some of it is an expectation that they impose on themselves. Someone like Mamie Till-Mobley [the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955] talked about feeling called by God to give meaning to the death of her son by becoming an activist and trying to get justice for his killing. But at the same time, I think there’s this sense that it’s the responsibility of Black people to do the work.

I wanted to talk about: What are the obligations on all of us, and how do we think about that? Particularly if we grapple with the costs of activism for the activists themselves. What obligations do the rest of us citizens have to not only make sure these things don’t happen again, but to not leave that work only to certain groups? An important argument in the book is the idea of redistributing this democratic labor. When we come to see these moments of horrendous Black suffering as doing a kind of work for democracy, then not only are we always expecting them, but it’s almost like they are necessary. There’s something, I think, really morally wrong with that.