In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Christine Y. Chen chats with Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, about her new book, Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton University Press, October 2023). Professor Hooker explores feelings of displacement that stem from racial dynamics in the United States, how groups experience it differently, and what it means in a multiracial democracy. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Why did you write this book?
This book looks at how citizens mobilize in response to loss. It argues that in the United States, we have had different distributions of loss: Black people have had to accept losses, and White people have been more insulated from it historically.
I started writing Black Grief/White Grievance in 2016 after the Ferguson protests. Of course, that all got reinforced in 2020 with the racial justice protests after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
I also started thinking about White grievance in 2016, with the elections and the ways in which anti-immigrant rhetoric was being mobilized.
How did you come up with the constructs of Black grief and White grievance in the title of your book?
These are two ways in which people respond to loss. Grief refers to sorrow after loss. And grievance is the experience of a harm or injustice which leads us to make claims for redress.
So often, people move from grief to grievance, especially if the loss that they’ve experienced isn’t the result of natural events but rather the result of a harm or an injustice. In the history of the United States, I argue that the pattern has been of disproportionate Black losses.
Grief refers to sorrow after loss. And grievance is the experience of a harm or injustice which leads us to make claims for redress. So often, people move from grief to grievance.
What do you mean by loss?
We all suffer losses. We’ve all lost a loved one, or we have had a candidate we supported who didn’t win. When I talk about political loss in particular in the book, I’m referring to losses that are not those ordinary human losses, but rather something that becomes a political loss as a result of state action or inaction. If there was a natural disaster and the state could’ve done something to prevent or lessen the loss of life, but that didn’t happen, that makes a loss political. The most obvious form of political loss is having your candidate lose or losing a policy debate. These are the ways in which I’m thinking about political loss in the book.
What was some of the research that led you to write this book?
I’m a political scientist, and I study political theory or political philosophy. Specifically, I have been looking at the work of African American thinkers—Black thinkers, particularly—and about the ways in which they think about how ideas about race have developed both in the United States and Latin America. I also look at questions of political solidarity and how we come to see each other as fellow citizens who deserve care and concern.
This book follows some of those lines of inquiry because it’s really about how people are being mobilized in response to this idea of political loss and how that’s driving some of the flashpoints around race that have become very visible in recent years.
Can you unpack the concepts of loss, refusal, and nostalgia?
The history of who has had to accept loss has been different for different groups in the United States. In democracies, we all have to lose. Your group can’t win all the time. This is something you have to accept if the rules are fair. The people you favor don’t win sometimes; they lose.
But what has happened in the history of the United States is that because White communities have been the dominant groups, they’ve not had to lose as much. They haven’t had to share political rule officially until the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act ended second-class citizenship for African Americans. This lack of experience with losing has meant that in moments when they felt like they were being displaced, some White citizens have responded with a refusal to accept the loss.
The history of who has had to accept loss has been different for different groups in the United States. In democracies, we all have to lose. Your group can’t win all the time.
We saw this in the 1960s with the people who were deeply opposed to the end of segregation. We therefore have this idea of nostalgia. There’s a sense that, in previous eras, there was a moment when there was less conflict around race.
What don’t most people in the United States understand about Black grief?
Since there is so much loss that Black people have experienced historically, from slavery to Jim Crow segregation to police violence, sometimes we take it for granted that this is who Black people are, and this is what they do.
We assume Black people are these heroic activists who are going to do the work of racial justice. One of the things that we don’t pay enough attention to is the costs of [Black] activism and the ways in which that is itself a loss for Black people in that we don’t allow them to be fully human. They have to carry a greater burden, perhaps, than other citizens.
This question of Black women’s activism, in particular, is a really important one. There was a cover of Vogue magazine a few years ago that featured Stacey Abrams and said, “Can Stacey Abrams save American democracy?” This was before her efforts mobilizing people to bring out the vote in Georgia. Abrams would go on to lose the gubernatorial election.
One of the things that we don’t pay enough attention to is the costs of that activism and the ways in which that is itself a loss for Black people in that we don’t allow them to be fully human.
At this point, she was not an elected public figure. And yet, she did all this work that was so central to getting other people elected. It is an example of honoring someone for the work that she does but not necessarily embracing her as a leader. This is emblematic of this expectation that we accept—or we expect—Black women’s labor on behalf of democracy, but we have a hard time embracing them as leaders that we should follow or accepting their political leadership.
What are the implications of your book for a society that is multiracial?
The title Black Grief/White Grievance refers to the ways in which Black and White people have had to respond to loss in the United States. Obviously, they’re not the only citizens in a multiracial democracy. And they’re not the only groups who are subject to this.
There are also ways in which we see, for example, Asian Americans targeted after the coronavirus pandemic. There were instances in which people, instead of dealing with their grief at what was happening, focused on blaming Asian Americans for the spread of the virus.
Some of these patterns are relevant to other groups. I think these questions: whose losses are visible? Whose losses do we see? Who are the people who need to do all of this activist work for us to care about what is happening to them? I think those questions are broader questions that will resonate with a lot of people.
What are the key points you hope readers will take from your book?
If we care about preserving US democracy, we all need to be involved in that. We can’t only depend on certain activists out there to do that work. It’s work that we all need to take up. One of the things that has been most surprising to me in a positive way is how much the arguments in the book have intuitively resonated with people.
“What are the ways in which activists do a certain kind of work to try to make us think about certain losses?” These are things that people can immediately grasp, along with the idea that people mobilize around grief and that it actually propels people to activism.
Watch the full interview
