Brothers in Grief: Institutional and Personal Grieving After Gun Violence at an Urban All-Boys School

• In Event: Negotiating Structural Violence in School and Community Settings: Healing Through the Trauma

Abstract

Drawing on two years of ethnographic and social media observation, in-depth interviews with students and adults, and school records at an all-male Philadelphia charter school, this paper tracks the aftermath of neighborhood gun violence on Black adolescent boys who experience the deaths of friends. I propose a three-stage theory of institutional and personal grief within the school: the easy hard, hard hard, and hidden hard stages highlight a progression over time in how friends experience and express their grief and how school policies, practices, and individual teachers’ behaviors support and constraint students’ recovery. The findings have significance for how schools see their role, not only in promoting academic achievement, but in responding to trauma and supporting students’ political development.

Author

• Nora Gross, Boston College