The Racial Politics of Disposition: Spatial Inequalities in Governing the Unclaimed Dead

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Embodiment in Politics, Resistance, and Social Movements

Abstract

Death comes for everyone; the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the ‘deserving ’and the ‘underserving’. While it’s true that death is an inevitable experience for all, this aphorism ignores how dying, death and disposition are subject to those same prejudices that plague the living. Racial, socioeconomic and spatial inequalities inform individuals’ journey to death and the process of disposition of the deceased. Contemporary studies of death are largely concerned with inequities in mortality rates in formal medical settings, the social relations of the deceased prior to their deaths, or the persisting ritual significance of funerals in the expression of collective grief. This study seeks to explore how the bodies of deceased individuals continue to face the negative consequences of racialization even after death. Utilizing Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and hotspot mapping, I examine how structural racism persists in the treatment of the deceased using the case of County Medical Examiner’s Office Indigent Disposition Program through comparing differences in time from death to cremation of the unclaimed deceased across racial-ethnic groups. Preliminary results suggest that race and ethnicity alone is insufficient to explain variation in cremation timelines, but through inclusion of spatial data, in which location of death is also considered, evidence of disparities in government’s disposition of the deceased arise. The deceased discovered outside of the immediate Chicago-area in communities with large Black and Latino populations are subject to longer times between death and cremation. By examining the ways disparities persist beyond death we are able to understand how necropolitical projects of the state not only rely on the uneven dispersal of death among the living but also on the continued spatial and racial marginalization of individuals after they have passed.

Author

• Charity Coleman, University of Illinois-Chicago