The Political Science Department’s Human Rights Lecture Series presents a lecture by:
Dr. Johanna Luttrell
"How White People Refuse to Understand Black Mourning: On White Responses to Black Lives Matter"
Thursday, February 14, 2019, 5:30 pm
Henry F. Hall Building, room 1220
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
This paper shows how white people in the U.S. tend to respond to expressions of black mourning by claiming it is unintelligible. The claim of unintelligibility often appears in the forms of: voyeurism (‘let me look longer’), appropriation (‘I will explain it for you’), gas lighting (pathologizing), tone policing (‘I cannot hear you when you say it like that’), and militarization (repression). What these forms have in common is that they are ways of managing and suppressing mourning. The paper urges that white understanding of black mourning must evolve from victim creating, victim blaming, and respectability politics in general. Drawing from both the Abrahamic tradition, in the book of Jeremiah, and forms of Greek tragedy, it shows how mourning involves the whole range of human emotion and can be a source of agency.
Dr. Johanna Luttrell is an Instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, and the Board President of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights. Her forthcoming book is entitled: White People and Black Lives Matter: Ignorance, Empathy and Justice.