In this article, Justin Grinage investigates how black youth experience and contest racial trauma using racial melancholia, a psychoanalytic conception of grief, as a framework for understanding the nonpathologized endurance of black resistance to racism. Examining data from a yearlong ethnographic study, Grinage engages the notion that melancholia is needed for mourning to take place, a crucial distinction that engenders agency in relation to the constant (re)production of racial oppression in the lives of five black twelfth-grade students at a multiracial suburban US high school. Grinage illustrates how racial melancholia structures racial trauma and analyzes its effects on black identity, dismissing pathologizing definitions of racial injury while centralizing the importance of asset-based, healing-centered approaches for enacting racial justice in education.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Summer 2019
Research Article|
June 01 2019
Endless Mourning: Racial Melancholia, Black Grief, and the Transformative Possibilities For Racial Justice in Education
JUSTIN GRINAGE
JUSTIN GRINAGE
University of Minnesota
Search for other works by this author on:
Harvard Educational Review (2019) 89 (2): 227–250.
Citation
JUSTIN GRINAGE; Endless Mourning: Racial Melancholia, Black Grief, and the Transformative Possibilities For Racial Justice in Education. Harvard Educational Review 1 June 2019; 89 (2): 227–250. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-89.2.227
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionCiting articles via
Black Bullet in the Gun: Troubling Silence and Silencing in Antiracist Teacher Education
Esther O. Ohito, Sherry L. Deckman
Book Notes
Jane Choi, Woohee Kim, Catherine E. Pitcher
Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
Catherine E. Pitcher