Porch Whispers and Public Silence: Silence, Grievability, and Collective Memory in Black Communities' Responses to Violence

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Abstract

This paper examines how Black communities engage in what I theorize as community dissemblance—collective practices of strategic forgetting and selective memory that determine which forms of violence become grievable and which remain consigned to whispers. Building on Hine's (1989) concept of dissemblance as individual Black women's protective strategy and Malone Gonzalez's (2025) theorization of "home silence" as protection from white epistemological violence, I extend these frameworks to theorize how communities collectively produce patterns of remembering and forgetting around intra-communal violence. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews with Black Mississippians conducted between January 2025 and February 2026, I ask: How do Black community members collectively remember, narrate, and enforce forgetting around violence against marginalized community members? Analysis reveals three central patterns: (1) spatial containment of dangerous knowledge through porch conversations versus public discourse, (2) strategic amnesia and denial that maintains idealized community narratives, and (3) hierarchies of grievability around feminized subjects—queer men, trans individuals, and cisgender women experiencing domestic violence. This study makes three theoretical contributions: extending dissemblance theory from individual to collective process; revealing mechanisms establishing hierarchies of which victims merit mourning versus abandonment; and illuminating how Southern contexts shape region-specific collective memory practices. The analysis demonstrates that collective silence is not absence but active memory work—communities know, remember, and simultaneously enforce forgetting, ultimately determining whose lives matter and whose deaths mobilize communities.

Author

• Jarvis Benson, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill