Juliet Hooker, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" (Princeton UP, 2023)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 13, 2023 · 56m

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 Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton UP, 2023), Juliet Hooker, a leading…