Disenfranchised grief and social inequality: bereaved African Canadians and oppositional narratives about the violent deaths of friends and family members

Abstract

This article discusses how disenfranchised grief, that is grief that has been invalidated in some manner, is experienced by African Canadians who have lost friends and family to gun-related violence. It is based on research findings suggesting that the violent deaths of young black men are partly rooted in racial stratification and perceived criminality. These factors have implications for how the deceased person is grieved. Covictims, the bereaved families and friends of deceased people, are impacted by the treatment they receive as a result of their social location as raced bodies. Police scrutiny of co-victims and the media representation of the victims as ‘known to police’ are just two of the ways in which grief is invalidated. The analysis points to the complexities of coming to terms with the death of loved ones in a liberal racial state where a group's precarious status signifies social meanings in life and death.

Keywords:

• African Canadians
• co-victims
• disenfranchised grief
• gun violence

Notes

1. Although men constitute the highest numbers of homicide victims, women are not entirely unaffected. For example, on 23 April 2005, Livvette Moore, a twenty-six-year-old black woman, was shot and killed at a nightclub in Toronto. She was the city's eighteenth homicide victim. On 26 December 2005, fifteen-year-old Jane Creba, a white teenager, was gunned down on Yonge Street. She was the seventy-eighth person killed as the year came to an end. Both women were innocent bystanders.

2. ‘Racialization takes place when differences between human beings are simplified and transformed into Difference, overvaluing particular bodily differences by imbuing them with lasting meaning of social, political, cultural, economic, even psychological significance’ (Dominguez 1994, 334). Author A argues that this view of racialization informs how marginalized groups are governed through state apparatuses in racial states.

3. In Canada, younger workers are classified as those aged fifteen to twenty-four years.

4. While it is important to identify areas that lack resources in order to improve the quality of life for the residents within them, ‘priority neighbourhoods’ is a contested term raising questions about the construction of neighbourhoods as deviant spaces.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erica Lawson

ERICA LAWSON is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario.