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 United
States as a white country under siege.
Drawing
on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in
US 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.