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“What a time to be alive”: The work of mourning and the privilege of black death

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Black intellectuals have long asserted the epistemic privilege of the oppressed. Enduring systemic violence on one’s body and soul offers clarity about the machinations of power, the way domination cloaks itself in lies. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images)

On the streets people are shouting, “Black lives matter!” In a sense, they really mean black deaths matter. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Michael Brown in Missouri and Trayvon Martin in Florida — these and countless other black deaths caused by police violence matter. By one count, security forces kill a black person in the United States every 28 hours. Whether violence is inflicted by police or poverty, environmental toxins dumped in black neighbourhoods or health disparities facing black populations, in the United States or around the world, protecting black lives from violent death matters.

In a definition that has gained currency in activist spaces, Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Anti-black racism refers to the increased likelihood that black persons will die before their time. Indeed, given the pervasiveness of racism, death has become closely associated with black life. To live, as a black person, means to grieve.

The poet Claudia Rankine observes that the central aim of the Black Lives Matter movement is to make public black mourning. Black mourning has long been a site of struggle. W.E.B. Du Bois writes movingly of how his attempts to mourn his son were thwarted when white onlookers shouted racial epitaphs at the funeral procession. The open-casket funeral of the lynched Emmett Till in 1955 set off the US civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycott launched three months later. Nyle Fort, an activist and minister, reflects on the “electricity and elegance of Black grief” that can catalyse a movement.

If death has long shadowed black life, preventing flourishing, leaders of the current movement for racial justice call for a transformation of society and a reallocation of resources that would guarantee the health, educational, cultural, and economic prerequisites to Black flourishing. As Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors puts it, “We’ve lived in a place that has literally allowed for us to believe and center only black death. We’ve forgotten how to imagine black life.” But we misunderstand this sentiment, this definition of what it means for black lives to matter, unless we think theologically.

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All life will end in death, no matter the colour. Our humanity is defined by its shared vulnerability, its shared grievability. It is easy to become obsessed with death, and to repress this obsession. We immerse ourselves in work or in family or in escapist pursuits with a vigour born of death’s denial. Our impending death sets the horizon for our reasons and passions. Living in a secular age, we have no other choice — or so it would seem.

In fact, the deepest meaning of Black Lives Matter is a call for new life rather than better life, for conversion rather than improvement. It is a call for life to be lived in a way that does not give death the final word. Once, it was religion that promised new life. Today, a nostalgic return to old religion is delusive. The only way to break the secular frame in which we live, organised by death, is through political struggle.

Black Christians aligned with the struggle against white supremacy have long appreciated the theological promise of political struggle. James Cone, often credited as the founding father of Black theology, wrote: “For blacks death is not really a future reality; it is a part of their everyday existence. They see death every time they see whites.” To struggle against white supremacy means to risk death, but if black life is already at risk of premature death, this is no obstacle. Why not consciously choose to risk death in struggle rather than allow the powers of white supremacy to put you at risk of death as you lead an ordinary, apolitical life? Once a black person realises these are the options and chooses struggle, death no longer has dominion over their life.

Cone is not suggesting that black people ignore the possibility of death. Rather, he is urging that death (or its denial) should not preempt all other reasons and passions. Once the correct choice has been made, Cone promises new life: “Because we know that death has been conquered, we are truly free to be human.” We can live in dignity. Our old life, when death has dominion, was hollowed out, distorted. Once we choose struggle, we enter a new life where genuine truth and joy are open to us.

Life in struggle does not guarantee perfect happiness. We still live in a world full of white supremacy, along with other interlocking systems of domination. But there is a fulsome, sweet, mellifluous quality to how we encounter our world and each other in this new life, even as it involves the ups and downs, the successes and disappointments, that inevitably accompany struggle in a deeply broken world.

Put a different way, struggle against domination is oriented to a world across an unbridgeable divide from our world. It is oriented to a world without domination. There is zero chance that we will succeed in purging our world of domination; if we imagine that we might succeed, we will strengthen rather than loosen the bonds of domination. However, in the process of struggle, we receive a foretaste of the world to come. In his song “The Revolution Has Come,” Black minister and activist Osagyefo Sekou proclaims, “What a time to be alive. / When we stand up / we’ve already won.” Sekou recalls how his grandmother would sing to herself, “I’m too busy working for my Jesus / I ain’t got time to die.”

Black intellectuals have long asserted the epistemic privilege of the oppressed. Enduring systemic violence on one’s body and soul offers clarity about the machinations of power, the way domination cloaks itself in lies. As Frederick Douglass once wrote, “They who study mankind with a whip in their hands, will always go wrong.” Vulnerability to premature death is, perversely, a privilege. For those insulated from death, safety and security, physically, psychologically, and intellectually, are preeminent concerns. For them, if self or world is to transform, there must be a clear plan for how to get from here to there. For those vulnerable to premature death who choose struggle, it is natural to put their bodies on the line for abolition (of police, of prisons, of every apparatus of domination) even if what that means practically is uncertain. They function as moral beacons, alerting the world that a life of truth, goodness, and beauty is not to be found by following the ways of the world. In short, the experts on domination are those most affected by domination, and they should be at the centre of struggles to end domination. Others have supporting roles to play.

Once, after I had delivered a public lecture about the salvific importance of struggle in an ancient, crowded university hall in the UK, one of the two or three black audience members raised his hand. A young black man who had tasted enough British racism to understand its intractability, said he was concerned that I was urging him and his black peers to embrace a burdensome life exclusively consisting in political labour. While struggle may be crucially important, he asked, should there not also be time to enjoy black sociality, not to mention music, art, and recreation? Blacks are already burdened by racism; now are they to be doubly burdened with both racism and leadership of the struggle against racial domination?

I offer three answers. First, struggle is an expansive term. It means activity oriented against systems of domination, in the service of conjuring new worlds. Such activity can be protest, but it can also be intellectual and aesthetic. Even quite mundane acts of refusal, misdirection, and imagination qualify. Second, the struggle against domination provides an orientation to activity in the world; it does not dictate specific daily requirements. Just as the Christian need not pray every hour, and yet in a sense her whole life is prayerful, those who struggle understand all their activities in light of the struggle. Third, we must not shy away from insisting on a tragic choice that needs to be made between the easy, clear path of vacuous comfort and security and the difficult, opaque path of struggle. The latter is, ultimately, an order of magnitude more satisfying, but that cannot be known without a leap of faith.

What prompts such a leap of faith? Mourning. When we mourn, we understand how hollow the safety and comfort provided by our world really is. We see our own exposure to death, as well as our shared humanity constituted by this vulnerability. We are primed to collectively discern and attack, at risk to ourselves, the forces of domination that cause premature death.

But mourning usually passes after a few private moments, days, or months. The work of Black Lives Matter is to force public mourning to continue interminably. As Claudia Rankine puts it, “National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption.” We must understand this intervention at the level of habits rather than policies, marking promised resurrection rather than holding a moment of silence.

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Natural Law, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology, and In Defense of Charisma, and co-author (with Joshua Dubler) of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons.

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