U.S. Democratic Deficit After the Ledger of Loss

Abstract

U.S. Democratic Deficit After the Ledger of Loss Katherine A. Gordy (bio) Juliet Hooker, Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. 360 pp. $32.00 (hc). ISBN: 9780691243030 As Juliet Hooker reminds us in her insightful, urgent, and beautifully written book Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss, democracy, contrary to common accounts, is as much about losing and accepting defeat as it is about winning and exercising power. The loss she focuses on is a specifically political loss made visible/political through state action/inaction that functions as a "site for political mobilization," and that democratic citizens, particularly the most privileged, "have an obligation to acknowledge and attend to" (9). In a white Democracy such as the United States, however, the burden of political loss has fallen dramatically and disproportionately on Black Americans (and other marginalized communities). "White supremacy," explains Hooker, "distributes democratic labor unequally" (10). Moreover, the responses and the expectations surrounding loss—how loss is mobilized politically—are distinct. Whereas the white response of "grievance" seeks to sustain the status quo, the Black response of grief "enacts a politics of transformation oriented to the redistribution of loss" (23). Because white Americans implicitly and explicitly understand citizenship as maintenance of their standing in the structures of white supremacy, they have responded to what is often simply a perceived, anticipated or symbolic loss with white grievance. This is exemplified in the everyday practices of white policing of Black people in public spaces, the lynching of Black people at the hands of white mobs and the police, and angry whites storming the capital on January 6 (2021). White grievance and Black grief are connected, as the former "obscures and supplants Black grief and is often mobilized in response to it" (3). The scholarship on democracy, notes Hooker, has tended not to treat racial violence as a threat to democracy, but white grievance is "profoundly anti-democratic" (22). If racial justice is to be anything but symbolic, white Americans, including progressive white Americans, must learn to accept economic, political and social losses without "resorting to white grievance" (12). Black Americans too must learn to sit with loss, too, but to the ends of "affirming Black life and refusing the script of sacrifice" (25). The work of democratic repair, argues Hooker, has fallen for too long on Black Americans. This work is not only unfair but has come at a great cost to Black well-being. The grief resulting from significant, frequent and often spectacular loss of Black life is cut short as that grief is mobilized for the ends of racial justice and democratic repair. This is one of the most profound contributions of the book. Hooker does not criticize Black protest or activism in general. Rather, she wants to call attention to what it costs Black life (in its fullest sense) to move too quickly from grief to political mobilization. Hooker writes: "There are costs to trying to make an injustice visible, and there are some harms that can never be fully repaired, and it is these elements that loss captures and is attentive to. Loss encompasses inchoate affective dimensions [End Page 130] that exceed categories such as harm or injustice" (7). Language alone is insufficient for capturing loss. As such, each of the book's four "interludes" focuses on "a political or theoretical gesture of refusal" (25). In the first, she criticizes conventional approaches to equality that attempt to compensate white losers. Such thinking simply reinforces the baseline entitlement whites feel as citizens, and does nothing to encourage them to develop an understanding of equality and citizenship that involves sitting with loss. The second, third and fourth interludes are particularly compelling. In the second, Hooker points to the dangers of celebrating democratic sacrifice as the epitome of "black political excellence/civic virtue" (92). This celebration stems from three theoretical and historical assumptions: the reduction of Black politics to a sanitized romantic narrative of the 1960s civil rights movement; the assumption of a white morality that is moved by Black "peaceful acquiescence to loss"; and the presumption that nonviolent protest represents acquiescence or sacrifice to Black agents (91). Hooker discredits all...