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 a larger book project, 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 black mourning as a democratic resource. 

Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009); Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017); and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her current book, Black Grief/White Grievance: Democracy and the Problem of Political Loss, is forthcoming in 2023 from Princeton University Press. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.