Grief and Black Feminist Theory

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Death and Legal Scholarship

Brittany Farr

The question of how this era of “mass carnage” impacts the substance of my work, has become, for me, a question about grief. In this brief essay, I explore one of the most well-known (and oft-theorized) examples of public grief in the U.S.—the murder of Emmett Till—in an effort to understand what lessons Black feminist theory might have for undertaking legal scholarship at a time when death, trauma, and loss feel more inescapable than ever. After all, Black feminist theorists and scholars of African American history more generally have long reckoned with the burden of mass death and its resultant grief. As historian and cultural critic Saidiya Hartman has written, “Grief is a central term in the political vocabulary of the diaspora.” (758).

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Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black boy who, while visiting family in Mississippi, was lynched by two white men. Till’s body was found days later in a river – unrecognizable due to the violence done to him. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on having an open casket at his funeral. She allowed photos of his disfigured body to be taken and publicized. In her words: “Let the people see what I see.” By holding her son’s funeral with an open casket, Mobley invited a public mourning, thereby transforming her personal loss into a political act. Till’s murder and its publicity—and his open casket in particular—have been credited with galvanizing the Civil Rights Movement.

Understanding the power of Mobley’s decision requires that we also remember the context in which she was living. Lynchings had long been public. Some were advertised in newspapers. Souvenirs were taken from the bodies of the dead men and women. There were postcards. In other words, lynchings were often spectacles of suffering by design– and their visibility and publicity furthered a notion that Black deaths and Black suffering were but another way of reinforcing white supremacy.

But Mobley shifted the framing of this publicity – from a celebration of white supremacist violence to a mourning of the devastation wrought by this racism. Her actions suggest that she well understood what poet Audre Lorde would articulate nearly two decades later, that her silence would not protect her. Grieving her son quietly and privately would not shield her from the reality of his murder or the further insult of his killers’ acquittal and later public confession. Lorde writes,

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. . . . Visibility which makes most of us vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. (29-30).

Whether or not Mobley had held her son’s funeral with an open casket, his absence from her life would have remained the same. Silence could not protect her from the violence of his death. Being silent is an imperfect and unpredictable protection at best – and the isolation that silence can fuel only adds more weight to the grief of understanding one’s own corporeal vulnerability.

Personally, I have found that the grief borne of racist violence is an uncanny feeling. The violence inflicted upon this “other” body makes me aware of the vulnerability of my own. And this awareness of vulnerability is something that these pandemics (the pandemics of racism and of Covid) share with one another: they threaten our bodies and our livelihoods; our loved ones are at risk; and we have limited agency with respect to how we can protect ourselves. And crucially – we are not all able to protect ourselves equally.

                Yet, it is not only our bodies that are implicated in this grief, but also our sense of time. The loss is not discrete; it does not exist solely in the past. Instead, we are mourning something that has happened, is happening, and will happen again—which means that the grief is both anticipatory and delayed. Anticipatory grief is what happens when you feel that more loss is yet to come – when you learn of a death (be it due to Covid or racist violence) and you feel both the immediate loss and also what that loss signals: that more deaths are on the horizon. Mobley’s decision to have an open casket engaged with these feelings of future loss: the image of Emmett’s brutalized face could not be relegated to the past. Instead, Till’s death became cemented in the public imaginary as an enduring symbol of the grief engendered by unchecked racism.

Thinking about grief as simultaneously preemptive and continuous, draws out the ways in which we are tied to one another in a network of vulnerability* – it pulls our attention to our connectedness and the feeling that violence against one of us implicates all of us. It also challenges our ways of seeing and thinking about death and suffering. Theorizing grief as ongoing invites us to ask about the conditions that made it possible, and about the systems and institutions that might make normalize certain deaths and suffering.

A grief-informed scholarly approach also demands a commitment to the messiness of legacies of violence. It encourages (and perhaps requires) a creativity and expansiveness with respect to how we think about evidence in our scholarship (e.g., what gets to count, which kinds of knowledge and forms of evidence are valued) and similarly, asks that we look as broadly as possible when we’re trying to assess the impact of violence. It’s not only death tolls, court cases, or legislation that matter, but also the art, stories, rituals, and emotions that emerge out of, and in response to, violence.

To put it differently, the legacy of Till’s murder far exceeds the acquittal of his killers, or failed attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation. Rather, Emmett Till is part of a violent “past that is not yet past” (Sharpe, 31). To make sense of his death—and others like it—requires engaging and accepting the power of grief to move between bodies and across time. Doing so is the only way to fully see the contours and consequences of violence, as Mamie Till Mobley once demanded.

* Moderator’s note: In addition to the linked work, the importance of Farr’s point about a “network of vulnerability” is reflected in Martha Fineman’s scholarship and the Vulnerablility and the Human Condition Initiative.