Civic Engagement After (Social) Death: Theorizing Black Kids' Public Mourning as Sites of Civic Possibility

• In Event: New Directions in Education for Civic Life: Research With Students and Teachers

Abstract

Research on the civic engagement of Black children tends to emphasize perceived patterns of deviance and lack rather than patterns of creativity and informed fugitivity. In this paper, I present findings from a one-year ethnographic study with six Black teenagers as they self-identified their civic work, or, their meaningful participation in efforts to advance the public good (Bobo & Gilliam, 1990; Harris & Battle, 2013; Kirshner 2015). Drawing on critical race and Afropessimist literature as a theoretical framework, I specifically engage the identity and civic implications of their contributions to public mourning campaigns for victims of violence in their community. Public mourning includes all the ways we display regard for the dead outside of our immediate kinship network (McIvor, 2016).

Findings indicate that activities including sharing knowledge about violence, curating memorials and participating in wakes for strangers constitute a civic insistence on Black dignity. My objective in this work is to demonstrate considerable theoretical and historical precedent for conceptualizing Black kids’ participation in public mourning as a form of civic engagement. Whether lived, experienced vicariously through social media or inherited through collective memory, violence against Black bodies and Black collective mourning in response to this violence has important civic implications. Since many Black children live with increased paranoia and anxiety that results from hyper-surveillance, proximity to racial violence and confrontations with death (Ginwright, 2004; Sharpe, 2016), it makes sense that their civic initiatives might be embedded in the everydayness of their survival. Naming such initiatives is one way to honor and support Black kids’ civic possibilities. Further, this work is a call to take up the idea of grief in research on civic engagement in general. Given that death and dying are ingrained in the civic realities of so many children, the absence of public mourning from civic engagement theory represents a significant limitation in efforts to understand, support or assess civic engagement.

References

Bobo, L., & Gilliam, F. D. (1990). Race, sociopolitical participation, and black empowerment. American Political Science Review, 84(2), 377-393.

Ginwright, S. A. (2004). Black in school: Afrocentric reform, urban youth & the promise of hip-hop culture. Teachers College Press.

Harris, A., & Battle, J. (2013). Unpacking civic engagement: The sociopolitical involvement of same-gender loving Black women. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17(2), 195-207.

Kirshner, B. (2015). Youth activism in an era of education inequality. New York University Press.

McIvor, D. W. (2016). Mourning in America. Cornell University Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Author

• Ashley N. Woodson, University of Michigan