Black Grief/White Grievance

The Politics of Loss

By: Juliet Hooker

Narrated by: Joana Garcia

This audiobook narrated by Joana Garcia reveals how race shapes expectations about whose losses matter

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the U.S. as a white country under siege.

Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in U.S. racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today’s Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post-Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till’s funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.

©2023 Juliet Hooker (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“This fascinating book provides a rich and timely dialogical space that goes beyond our polarized politics. Juliet Hooker’s subtle analysis gets inside the complex dynamics of the Black and White worlds in order to deepen our commitment to democratic possibilities.”—Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary

“Juliet Hooker has penned an intervention that is important, necessary, and long overdue. The significance of loss and its unequal distribution has gone without saying in political theory for far too long. This omission has prevented us from attempting to grapple honestly with the fact that some of what has been lost is impossible to recover or repair, and from understanding what costs are embedded in actually existing democratic life and who has been made to bear those costs. Hooker's contribution in this work is surgical and incisive, with large implications for the field.”—Deva Woodly, author of Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movement

“This book is an extraordinary work of critical race studies and democratic theory. Alert to the inchoate affective dimensions of loss, Hooker brilliantly reveals a deeply racialized economy of suffering that demands the interminable spectacle of Black death and public performance of Black loss. Resisting the democratic politics of repair, she discovers new forms of Black worldmaking that inspire transformative action in the present.”—Linda M. G. Zerilli, University of Chicago

Good academic read

This is a very thorough, academic review on the topic of racism and white supremacy. It has relevance to our current situation as well as a sound historical foundation. It isn’t written in layman’s terms. So it’s not super accessible in that sense. It would be great if someone took the facts and thesis and created a more plain speak podcast or documentary. The narrator was also a little wooden but once sped up a tad it was easy to listen to.