ASALH Conference Panel - Death and Grief Among Black Communities
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Organization: Association for the Study of African American Life and History
The proposed panel dovetails with this year’s conference theme for ASALH "African American labor." While it is true that “Black labor has been central to political, economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations,” the hardships of that labor and the intricacies of Black lived experiences have also led to all types of death. As people of African descent continue to be accosted on multiple fronts, examining both our historical and present-day experiences around the subject of death is an undertaking worth engaging. In recent years, conversations about the uncomfortable subject of death were facilitated by the pandemic, and several studies have documented the disproportionate mortality rate from COVID-19 for Black people in the United States. Yet long before the rise of the pandemic, the deaths of Black people—and the circumstances that led to their deaths—created deep aches in the souls of the people who cared about them. Still, neither the pandemic nor perpetual public video footage of gruesome deaths of Black people at the hands of police officers, for instance, has eliminated the underrepresentation of Black people’s experiences with grief in research studies; grief continues to be understudied among U.S. Black communities. The Collective for Radical Death Studies expresses the importance of death studies featuring Black people in their declaration that death work is “synonymous with anti-racism work.” With this perspective in mind, this panel explores historical and contemporary discussions and challenges related to death, grief experiences, and attitudes toward death from the perspectives of Black people. Ultimately, this panel strives for healing as an end goal, and it acknowledges that the interrelations between death, grief, and trauma are weighty matters.
By March 7th, please contact the panel chair Dr. Robin Brooks at rob88@pitt.edu if you are interested. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the same email address.
Robin Brooks
