Sanitizing racialized grief: Presidential campaign eulogy during “the time of two pandemics”

ABSTRACT

As the 2020 election campaign unfolded within a sanitary rhetorical ecology of COVID-19, so too did Joe Biden’s grief practices. This essay examines two of Biden’s campaign moments where he recognized 100,000 and 200,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19. While Biden’s aggregate marking of those lost during the pandemic was a necessary rhetorical endeavor in the face of Donald Trump’s systematic COVID-19 denial, his speech homogenized ethnic, cultural, and racialized experiences of grief. Doing so sanitized the larger context of health inequities that persist in the United States and elided the ways that COVID-19 grief was compounded by the extant public health crisis of anti-Black police brutality. This essay encourages critics of campaign eulogy to attend to the emotional-viral-load of racialized grief during moments of national crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Eulogy
• grief
• COVID-19
• public health
• presidential campaign

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2 Sean Illing, “Why the National Stockpile Wasn’t Prepared for this Pandemic,” Vox, April 15, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21210210/coronavirus-covid-19-national-strategic-stockpile.

3 Matthew Miller, “It’s Not Just the Bleach. Trump is a Catalog of Bad Ideas that Tax Resources,” Washington Post, April 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/26/ingest-bleach-trump-coronavirus/.

4 Susanne Hirt and Jessica Priest, “Coronavirus Hotspots Brace for Deaths with Refrigerated Trucks on an Unprecedented Scale,” USA Today, April 10, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/10/coronavirus-deaths-states-prepare-bodies-refrigerated-trucks/5131066002/.

5 Marina Levina and Kumarini Silva, “Cruel Intentions: Affect Theory in the Age of Trump,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 70–2, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.1435080.

6 Lisa Bowleg, “We’re Not All in This Together: On COVID-19, Intersectionality, and Structural Inequality,” American Journal of Public Health 110, no. 7 (2020): 917, doi:10.2105/AJPH.2020.305766.

7 Katie Glueck and Matt Flegenheimer, “Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief,” New York Times, June 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/joe-biden-funeral-speech.html.

8 Elizabeth Yuko, “Grief is the Unofficial Theme of the Biden Campaign, and That’s Exactly What We Need,” Rolling Stone, August 24, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/joe-biden-grief-loss-dnc-speech-1049119/.

9 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

10 Jamie Landau and Bethany Keeley-Jonker, “Conductor of Public Feelings: An Affective-Emotional Rhetorical Analysis of Obama’s National Eulogy in Tucson,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 166–88, doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.1447138.

11 Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), xx.

12 Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 3.

13 Kimberly D. Manning, “When Grief and Crises Intersect: Perspectives of a Black Physician in the Time of Two Pandemics,” Journal of Hospital Medicine 15, no. 9 (2020): 566–67, doi:10.12788/jhm.3481.

14 Manning, “When Grief and Crises,” 566.

15 Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006).

16 Avril Maddrell, “Bereavement, Grief, and Consolation: Emotional-Affective Geographies of Loss During COVID-19,” Dialogues in Human Geography 10, no. 2 (2020): 107–11, doi:10.1177/2043820620934947.

17 Joe Biden, “There are moments in our history so grim, so heart-rending, that they're forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief. Today is one of those moments. 100,000 lives have now been lost to this virus.To those hurting, I'm so sorry for your loss. The nation grieves with you.” Twitter, May 27, 2020, 4:30 PM, https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1265757168504049664.

18 Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” New York Times, June 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html. Also cited in, Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 16.

19 “Geoge Floyd Memorial: ‘Pandemic of Racism Killed Him,’ Family Lawyer Says,” Global Herald, June 3, 2020, https://theglobalherald.com/news/george-floyd-memorial-pandemic-of-racism-killed-him-family-lawyer-says/.

20 Corrigan, Black Feelings, 81.

21 Allison M. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 166–93, doi:10.1080/00335630.2016.1156145.

22 Edwin Black, “Gettysburg and Silence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 1 (1994): 21–36, doi:10.1080/00335639409384053.

23 Joe Biden, “Joe Biden Remarks in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” CSPAN, October 6, 2020, https://www.c-span.org/video/?476667-1/joe-biden-appeals-unity-bipartisanship-gettysburg-address.

24 Will Dunham, “Joe Biden Assumes Leadership of a U.S. Crisis After Trump Years,” Reuters, January 20, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSL1N2JU14Q.

25 “What George Floyd’s 6-Year-Old Daughter and Her Mom Want the World to Know,” ABC News, June 3, 2020, YouTube Video, 1:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSES84gYomM.

26 Rachel R. Hardeman, Eduardo M. Medina, and Rhea W. Boyd, “Stolen Breaths,” New England Journal of Medicine 383, no. 3 (2020): 199, doi:10.1056/NEJMp2021072.

27 Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 86, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/801954.

28 Andre E. Johnson and Earle J. Fisher, “‘But, I Forgive You?’: Mother Emanuel, Black Pain, and the Rhetoric of Forgiveness,” Journal of Communication and Religion 42, no. 1 (2019): 19.

29 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 2, doi:10.177/0003122418816958.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Emily Winderman

Emily Winderman is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The author would like to thank Allison M. Prasch, Sam Martin, and Kari Anderson for their feedback during the development of this essay.