Grieving Labor: Maternal Bereavement, Race, and Gender

Although national crime rates have declined in recent years, African American and Latinx mothers still experience the homicide of a child twice as often as White mothers. Unlike much of the scholarship that describes grief as a universal experience, my work shows how economic, racial, and gender inequities compound and complicate bereavement for historically minoritized groups. My dissertation draws on data collected between 2012 and 2018 in Oakland and Salinas, California and Chicago, Illinois. During this time, I partnered with several community organizations advocating for families impacted by violence. I organically grew closer to four mothers who had lost children to homicide and who became the key participants in my study: Anjanette Albert, Demitra Barnes, Debbie Aguilar, and Princess Beverly Williams. This small sample size of Black and Latina mothers allowed me to observe variation in mothers’ bereavement processes closely. In four case studies, we see how surviving mothers endure at least two forms of symbolic violence. Firstly, they are burdened with sanitizing their children’s public representations, which appear as one-dimensional or criminal or both. Secondly, maternal grief is commodified by members of the media, the not-for-profit industrial complex, and political apparatus for personal and professional gain. Materially, these participants’ labor is exploited, and the stress they experience because of being overworked and underpaid exacerbates the negative symptoms of their already-complex trauma. Mutual aid, nurturance culture, and grief therapy provide frameworks with which to envision new ways of responding to racialized and gendered violence. As the experiences of all the mothers in this study illustrate, it is only by being nurtured and cared for by others that we move through grief