Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools | Non-Member Registration

Description

The webinar will introduce and illustrate the main findings from my new book, Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools.

Brothers in Grief spotlights the neglected aftermath of neighborhood gun violence and its consequences for racial and educational equity. Drawing on two years of school-based ethnography and more than five years of digital ethnography at a single-sex charter school in Philadelphia, sociologist Nora Gross examines how Black teen boys manage their grief after losing friends to gun violence and how school leaders and teachers balance their educational mission with often incomplete understandings of students’ emotions. The book conceptualizes the progression of institutional responses to student grief as a set of stages: the easy hard, hard hard, and hidden hard. In the aftermath of multiple student murders, the school initially recognizes the need for communal outlets for student grief, but soon the urgency of educating Black boys deemed ‘already behind’ takes priority. Relying on myths of Black resilience and male stoicism, the school ushers students back to ‘business as usual.’ Despite the adults’ best intentions, these decisions fail to mitigate the effects of peer loss on students’ social and educational trajectories. Although students’ persistent, unacknowledged grief is narrated constantly in online peer-driven social media spaces, it remains hidden from the adults making decisions about their education. Forcing students’ grief into hiding produces long-term social injuries for some students. Brothers in Grief concludes with a discussion of what can be learned from other youth and school responses to gun violence and proposes that schools could play a role in helping youth translate their collective grief into productive forms of grievance and action.