Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

On December 3, 2014, the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, held a press conference to discuss the decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to indict the police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. Garner had died the previous July while being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes, his death caused by asphyxiation as the result of a chokehold applied by Pantaleo, despite Garner’s repeated exhortation to the arresting officer—captured by amateur video—“I can’t breathe!” De Blasio began by remarking how the decision of the grand jury had served to refresh the loss occasioned by Garner’s death. As he put it, “We are grieving, again, over the loss of Eric Garner.” The Garner incident, de Blasio continued, touched on painful and pressing issues such as police-community relations and civil rights, and he claimed that American citizens now faced “a national moment of grief.”¹

As if in verification of this national moment of mourning, in the days and weeks following Garner’s death, multiple “die-in” protests were held locally in Staten Island, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, and as far afield as Boston; Washington, D.C.; and London. At many of these events protesters chanted “I can’t breathe” in unison before silently prostrating themselves on the ground in a kind of mournful sit-in. Several of the protests were organized under the slogan and nascent social movement of “Black Lives Matter,” which began as a social media hashtag coined by three young African American women in response to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case—another incident in which an unarmed African American had been killed without the killer having to face legal repercussions.² Black Lives Matter quickly became a rallying cry for national protests, not only over the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner but also over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; Jamar Clark in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

The Black Lives Matter protests and the repeated instances of death and disregard that have continued to motivate them imply that we face less a “moment” of grief than an enduring situation of loss, pain, and vulnerability—a situation that has not been adequately faced by public institutions or ordinary citizens. For Claudia Rankine, the Jamaican-born poet and the author of Citizen: An American Lyric—an award-winning reflection on everyday experiences of racial disrespect—the Black Lives Matter protests represent nothing less than an “attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture.”³ Only a “sustained state of national mourning,” Rankine argues, can provide witness to the ongoing “devaluation … [of] black lives.”⁴ In making these arguments, Rankine cited the example of Mamie Till Mobley, whose refusal to “keep private grief private” when her son Emmitt was murdered in 1955 reflected a desire to “make mourning enter our day-to-day world … as a method of acknowledgment” in the struggle for equality—a desire that needs to be rekindled in the post–civil rights context of mass incarceration, enduring poverty, social neglect, and deep interracial mistrust.⁵

A chorus, then, of public officials, concerned citizens, and social critics is converging at the time of this writing on the themes of loss, grief, and mourning, and the fraught connection between painful social realities and avowed democratic ideals. Yet some important questions remain unanswered. What precisely would it look like for citizens to keep mourning as an “open dynamic” in American politics and culture? What would it mean if mourning were envisioned as a kind of civic or democratic obligation? What might that say about mourning, and what might it mean for democracy? Mourning is typically envisioned as a finite course to be run, a temporary retreat from the outside world, and a staggered process by which one returns.⁶ And democracy implies coexistence amid plurality, occasional cooperation between strangers, and tolerance for differences—not the kind of intimacy or empathy that inspires feelings of deep grief. So what, then, would it mean for citizens to practice a politics of mourning?

The chapters that follow directly address these difficult and urgent questions. They offer a way of thinking about public mourning as less a means of getting past or moving on from traumatic experiences than as an ongoing democratic labor of recognition and repair. This labor is what I refer to as the democratic work of mourning, which is both a theory and a set of practices that, together, can form the basis for an open and ongoing response to experiences of social disrespect and marginalization. The democratic work of mourning takes seriously the idea of a civic obligation of mourning, yet it also offers a properly political understanding of mourning itself. Democratic mourning is not reducible to rituals of grief in response to experiences of public loss or trauma, such as the flowers or flags (soon to fade) left at the scene of a calamity. It is not reducible to the speeches and eulogies given for the fallen. Instead, democratic mourning is an ongoing labor of recognition and repair—of recognizing experiences of social trauma and cultivating civic repertoires of response. This labor is ongoing because it is an accompaniment to the (endless) work of building democratic commonwealth. Democratic citizens and communities need spaces and practices through which the damages of disrespect and the complexities attendant to public history and identity can be confronted and to some extent worked through. The democratic work of mourning responds to these urgent needs by identifying the meaning and means of—along with the obstacles to—these political and social labors.

The Black Lives Matter movement is perhaps the most recent reminder of the connection between loss and social grievance, or between mourning and politics, but this is a timeless topic for political communities and therefore a frequent concern for political theorists. In exploring these themes, we are drawn back to the experience of Attic tragedy and Greek democracy of the fifth century BCE. Within the tragic festival and performances, the ancient Athenians displayed a keen sensitivity to issues of trauma, loss, and suffering that continues to illuminate and inspire our own political dramas. For such reasons, the names of Antigone, Orestes, and Electra still populate contemporary reflections on the politics of loss and mourning. Rankine herself, visiting Ferguson during the protests for Michael Brown, explicitly drew a connection between the pathologies of American democracy and the stories of Greek tragedy:

It almost felt Greek. Predetermined, and hopeless. And then you had all these police cars with white policemen and policewomen, just sitting inside the cars, looking out at you. It was like you were in a theater, and they were this encased audience. It made me think of Antigone. And so that’s what I’m working on—a rewriting of Antigone, as a way of discussing what it means to decide to engage. The dead body’s in the street. What do you do now?⁷

If the politics of loss and grief is at least as old as Antigone, however, these questions have also taken on new poignancy and urgency in the context of what many scholars refer to as the “age of apology,” which has been heralded by the appearance of a variety of formal and informal mechanisms of acknowledgment for historical traumas and injustices.⁸ Foremost among these mechanisms are the rapidly proliferating truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) that have been initiated in a variety of national and local contexts, ranging from the famous South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (completed in 2015) to lower profile processes such as the Maine-Wabanaki State Child Welfare TRC.⁹ Truth and reconciliation processes seem to embody the idea that acknowledging or “facing up” to historical traumas is the only way to advance efforts toward social repair. Perhaps, to paraphrase James Baldwin, not everything that is faced can be changed, but to disavow the work of confrontation is to radically preclude the possibility of change.¹⁰

In this book, I bring conversations within and beyond political theory about the connection between mourning and politics together with the literature on truth and reconciliation processes in order to explore and theorize the democratic promise of the latter. Ranging from the time of Antigone to our own, this book explores the democratic politics of mourning. At the heart of this project is the example of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC), a grassroots-organized TRC that operated in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 2004 to 2006. The GTRC, like other TRCs, was not a magical device of social repair. Yet it did mark the creation of public space for dialogue and deliberation about a painful event in the city’s history—the so-called Greensboro Massacre of November 1979—and the complicated pathways between that event and the present life of the community. I argue that the GTRC, when contextualized within a democratic theory of mourning, can provide a model for similar means and mechanisms of responding to the frustrations, blockages, and confusions within our contemporary politics of grief.

Mourning or Morning in America?

It should be acknowledged at the outset, however, that the idea that mourning might be a kind of civic obligation or an open democratic dynamic cuts against a powerful current in American political and cultural life. American political identity, in fact, has in some ways been predicated on the ability to overcome the past, to start anew or begin again. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, argued that America’s culture of democratic inventiveness owed a great deal to the fact that it was unburdened by an aristocratic past. The absence of a burdening tradition allowed for outsized expectations of upward mobility and ever-expanding well-being.¹¹ Nearly two hundred years after Tocqueville’s visit, the idea that Americans are not beholden to the past remains a potent political trope. This trope was perhaps wielded most effectively in the reelection campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1984, which featured the famous political advertisement, “Morning in America.” The ad implied that the strength, confidence, and indefatigable optimism of American citizens are reflected in the collective unwillingness to dwell on the past and to eagerly greet each day as a new opportunity to be seized and exploited—“It’s morning, again, in America.”

It is easy to dismiss this optimism as delusional or naïve, yet such ideas have political utility because they have deep cultural resonance. In a different form from the Reagan advertisement, they are reflected in the classic Bob Dylan song, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” in which the listener is implored to “forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you,” and to “strike another match, go start anew.”¹² The myth of self-invention and perpetual innovation paints the country as a collective of ingenious individuals full of audacious hopes, capable at any moment of a sudden break into unanticipated territory. Dwelling on the past is not only a waste of precious energy; it is practically un-American.

If the power of this myth is understandable, it is nonetheless powerfully misleading and profoundly problematic in a country marked by historical brutalities and by ongoing realities of disrespect and despair. This myth reflects a political and psychological investment in innocence, a belief that each new dawn is a potential rupture from the past. It is Baldwin, again, who testified to the problematic nature of American innocence, when he wrote that Americans “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”¹³ The historical crimes are one matter, but Baldwin faults his fellow citizens more for the attitude of blithe disregard about those crimes. As Baldwin put it in 1962, the “problem of American identity has everything to do with all the things that happened in this country but never have been admitted or dealt with.”¹⁴ The collective inability or unwillingness to mourn the past—and the presence of the past—poisons American politics and identity.

Mourning, however, should not be viewed in terms of an endless dwelling on the past. As I see it, democratic work of mourning is also inherently future oriented, because it is animated by an aspirational politics of recognition that compels us not only to face down the complexities that brutality has produced and continues to produce for American identity, but also to think about and locate practices of respect and recognition that might establish this identity on surer footing. To provide witness to the compromised state of democratic ideals is not to practice a cynical or sharp-eyed realism about the hollowness of those ideals—it is an exercise of those ideals. The nonmanic hope for a more democratic future in a country marked by both a brutal past and a troubled present is connected, I argue, with the collective ability to craft spaces and norms of mourning that in turn provide occasions for democratic efforts of recognition and repair.

The connection between politics and mourning is old, but the meaning of this connection remains contested and complex. The following chapters work through these complexities and offer a way of thinking about and practicing social mourning in ways that might honor democratic ideals while acknowledging the complex history, uneven enactment, and uncertain future of those ideals. To keep mourning an open dynamic in a democratic society is a difficult charge, made even more difficult by powerful myths of innocence and perpetual renewal. It requires a psychological and practical reorientation toward democratic identity and civic responsibility. Yet as the Black Lives Matter protests demonstrate, this reorientation is both urgently needed and long overdue. It’s mourning, then, in America.