In this moment so profoundly shaped by the activism of the contemporary Movement for Black Lives, on the one hand, and the rearticulation of gendered white entitlement to domination, on the other, Juliet Hooker’s Black Grief/White Grievance inventories and intervenes in the political life of loss in US racial politics. Alongside the history in the United States of whose lives matter, Hooker traces a racialized rubric of what and whose losses matter: whose loss is registered as grievable; who is disproportionately expected and made to bear loss; what kinds of losses have been produced by and have politically constituted white democracy; whose loss and what loss is expected to be translated in order to be legible; who is entitled to insist that a loss merits or requires public grievance and how; whose grief is policed; and whose grief activism comes even at the cost of life. Hooker traces and refuses this rubric, refusing civic repair made on the grounds of Black grief and calling instead for an expanded Black politics of doing and being with grief differently.

Opening with a reading of the January 6 Capitol Insurrection, chapter 1 theorizes white grievance that is mobilized around anticipatory loss, historicizing white refusal to accept political loss (including symbolic loss) as a structuring element of white political identity. The chapter chronicles the contorted math that magnifies white loss and serially unsees/diminishes or even reads as deserved the political losses experienced by Black people, indigenous people, immigrants, and others. It shows that racial justice work must “squarely confront white grievance and refusal to accept loss” (p. 41). Chapter 2, in turn, attempts to free Black politics from the project of repairing white democracy. Hooker confronts key historical and theoretical assumptions about how antiracist change has happened in the United States, rejecting the romantic and sanitized narrative of the 1960s civil rights movement (with its teleology of progress and its script about the perfectability of American democracy). She dispels overstated and misstated claims about the efficacy of peaceful acquiescence and exposes how dominant historical and contemporary narratives misread as “democratic sacrifice” actions understood by Black activists as practices of defiance and world-making.

Chapter 3 centers Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells as exemplary theorists of loss, studying how they “balance grief and grievance” (p. 130). Hooker shows that even as Jacobs and Wells aimed to transform white public opinion and pressed for change in policy and law, they also grieved the loss of Black life. Where the second chapter refused the positioning of Black politics as a site of democratic repair on the grounds of false ideas about how antiracist change happens, chapter 4 rejects a Black politics of democratic sacrifice because of the unacceptable toll it places on Black people, especially on Black women. With particular attention to Black maternal grief, the chapter calls for a grieving activism that “refuses to instrumentalize grief and bear the burdens of activism” (p. 25). The book’s concluding chapter powerfully theorizes salvaging over and against repairing US democracy. More aligned with a Black feminist politics of refusal, and as a practice that Hooker suggests might follow refusal, salvaging means “rethinking, remaking, or building from scratch a truly egalitarian democracy where one has not really existed” (p. 243). As a whole, the book’s structure intersperses chapters with poetic interludes, moving between “fact and affect,” aesthetics and interpretive analysis, as Hooker would have any serious student of Jacobs and Wells practice.

Black Grief/White Grievance richly theorizes, faithfully archives, and distinctly enacts refusal. Hooker dwells with a “strand of Black political thought that has resisted reparative approaches to loss that privilege appeals to the state” (p. 16). In this tradition, and in Hooker’s own writing, this is a refusal of the role of Black-sacrifice-for-white-democracy; a refusal to set formal demands on the state or white-dominated publics as the horizon of Black politics of loss; a refusal of the instrumentalization of Black grief; and, as Hooker describes of the book’s own central call, a refusal to “exchange Black suffering for white identification” (p. 25). For Hooker, refusal does not mean a full withdrawal from formal politics, but a reorientation of that work, together with an expansion of noninstrumental practices of grieving (and seeing those practices as critical elements of a Black politics of loss).

Nestled right near refusal is something else that is faithful to Black life and Black loss in a different way. It is completely different in its horizon than formal appeals for recognition. It is noninstrumental. If I understand Hooker correctly, I think this is grieving itself, a practice of grieving in Black politics. This part is not about translating and mobilizing loss to make demands of the state or to cut through white racial seeing. This part has to do with feeling, enumerating, being with, attending to, and archiving loss—doing these things for Black life, in service of Black life, unhooked from formal political demands, not oriented toward white-dominated publics. As I’ll turn to next, grieving can happen alongside grievance, or in fugitive spaces, and in both kinds of sites we can find a faithfulness to quotidian detail, or what Ross Gay has called “small needful fact[s]” (cited in Hooker, pp. 125, 127). I’ve disarticulated these two different kinds of practices (grievance and grief), but they can be, as in key works that Hooker reads, co-temporal and interwoven.

Hooker’s reading of Jacobs and Wells brings these practices into shape and view. We come to see how in Jacobs’ and Wells’ writings a single text may at once have instrumental elements aimed to transform white-dominated publics (in ways that refuse black-grievance-as-sacrifice) and also include noninstrumentalized grief. That is, Jacobs’ and Wells’ texts issue appeals meant to transform white public opinion, but they do so in distinct ways. With deftness, they at once conceal detail (not everything is revealed, shared, offered up), fill in noninstrumental detail that archives Black life and grieves Black loss, and intervene in national discourse not only through content but form, as in the way they at once claim and subvert sentimental and journalistic genres, respectively. They keep their attention wide to where grief lives, and what losses must be grieved. Hooker shows us, for example, how Jacobs attends to ongoing extraction, slow forms of lethal violence, and sexual and reproductive violence (p. 145); and how Wells archives specific scenes of family grief in the wake of lynching (p. 164) and scenes of Black life upended or foreclosed by White race riots (pp. 161–162).

With wider implications for studies of the relationship between politics and emotions, Black Grief/White Grievance intervenes in prevailing theorizations of mourning in democratic politics. Hooker exposes the impasse between existing scholarship on loss, on the one hand, and the unremitting pattern and structural causes of Black loss, on the other. She challenges the ways Black grief and loss are harnessed as a resource for democratic theory, insisting on a political theory of loss in which Black grief and grievance are theorized in service of Black life. Here arise critical questions about how Black politics and Black political thought get mined as a resource for theoretical projects that are invested in repairing political structures and ideas that have historically been antagonistic to Black communities.

Relatedly, I see the book as a core text in a potent turn underway in political theory, a turn anchored in Black feminist lineages of political thought that attend to horizons of politics and ways of being politically that go beyond and have a different center of gravity than democratic theory’s best thinking on democracy. Black Grief/White Grievance also makes significant contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship on refusal, and the book’s arguments about loss, whiteness, and activism are significant for scholars of social movements, racial politics, and US politics. Reading today, in a moment of escalating authoritarian politics and shifting racial formations, has me wanting to learn more from Hooker about multiracial right-wing grievance (which, as she notes, is anchored in white grievance politics). Finally, just as Hooker’s Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009) has shaped my thinking on political identity and racialized solidarity, Black Grief/White Grievance pushes my thinking on these themes in relationship to political appeals. For one thing, the book pushes me to linger longer with how one text (e.g., a speech, or book, etc.) can, in part, be an appeal but also contain elements that are not an appeal—that are expressive of and in service of life-giving projects outside of public-facing demands, projects that are oriented in different directions. (I can think of many instances in Southerners on New Ground’s [SONG’s] work here.)

There is no experience that automatically makes a we. Loss does not automatically make a we—it is the interpretation of a loss that matters to identification, and the interpretive frames through which racialized loss is filtered in the national imaginary emerge from the very frames that produced and justified those losses in the first place. It is perilous, costly, and uncertain work to translate Black loss into a political and identificatory field that is interpretively structured by white supremacist ideology’s epistemology of ignorance, to borrow from Charles Mills. Black Grief/White Grievance deepens my thinking about political appeals in a polity that is structured by hierarchy and disposability along racial and other lines—and here I am thinking about the costs to Sylvia Rivera and Lorraine Hansberry of their specific appeals that I study in my own book. The mishearing, the disavowal, the enormous costs, the fleeting outcomes, the antagonisms—Hooker spends important time here, enumerating the dangers, mapping the debts accrued; discerning what to refuse and what to remake; and pointing us toward how racialized political imaginaries must transform.