Discussions on Democracy: Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss
with author and political theorist Juliet Hooker

Join author, professor, and political theorist Juliet Hooker in conversation on her new book, Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss. In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. In Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.

 

 

 

 

Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Professor Hooker is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This event will be held online via Zoom.