There is an etiquette to grief.
You would never, for instance, attend the funeral of someone who had died of cancer and explain to the people there that heart attacks are the real killers of our time. Or approach a mourner and tell them that everybody experiences loss and that they should take the time to validate your sadness, too. Right?
Raw as grief is, when we mourn we usually comport ourselves in such a way that we can be as compassionate and helpful as possible towards those who are grieving most. We try to be sensitive, to acknowledge other people’s pain. Where there are larger causes of grief, we commiserate that such causes exist.
Loss is unique. Each one has context. That is what makes grief a real thing and not an abstraction. If we redirect the context by diluting it until the loss is universal and therefore applicable to us, then we take away from the significance of a tragic event and inflate our own significance, which is a crappy thing to do.
Cultural grief is a real thing, too. When lots of people mourn together over a loss of national or cultural import, things get more politicized. More people are involved and the stakes are higher, especially if a tragic event has happened for political reasons. We all feel the need to weigh in, to participate in a shared moment, but when that happens, why would we stop applying the same compassionate and selfless etiquette that seems so obvious when we’re surrounded by personal grief?
Recently I was at a memorial vigil to honour the 25th anniversary of the École Polytechnique Massacre in Montréal. The vigil was held on a university campus and the dean of its engineering school spoke.
He meant well. And he gave the general impression that he was himself fully against gender-based violence and fully supportive of women’s involvement in the professions.
He talked about the massacre as an attack on all people. In this instance, that’s simply not true. Marc Lepine began his attack by walking into a classroom, explaining that he was fighting feminism, dividing male and female students and letting the men go before shooting the nine women who remained. He went on to kill 14 women in total before shooting himself. It was specifically not an attack on all people. It was an attack on women.
The dean went on to celebrate his ability to “not see gender” when he looks at his students and his hope that one day instead of seeing gender, everyone will just see people, like he does. (For the record, university engineering programs and workplaces still really do see gender).
To erase misogyny from the equation in the dean’s remembrance of the event—to say generally that violence affects everybody—was to gloss over the reason these women died, their personal accomplishments in becoming engineering students in the first place, the conditions that made the massacre possible and the significance of their deaths. To the dean, the event mattered because it affected “all people;” what made it important was not its meaning for a group of people to which he does not belong, but its vague relevance as an injustice to everybody, i.e., himself.
The current debates over #BlackLivesMatter are incredibly important in this regard because they show us how hard it is to decentre ourselves in moments of public grief. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement created in part because of the deaths of black men, most specifically Trayvon Martin, at the hands of police. It is “a call to action and a response” to a racist political situation that is responsible for the state-sanctioned killing of a black person every 28 hours in the U.S. As a way to mourn and to work towards healing, the movement is grounded in a distinct community and a specific situation; the loss of a young black man at the hands of a state that is 21 times more likely to kill a young black man than a young white man.
As co-founder Alicia Garza notes, however, that context has become dissipated by other social movements striving for unity. The pushback from social groups insisting that “all lives matter” is a better response to police violence, especially in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, fails to take account of “the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives.” It also fails to challenge the extent of our empathy. “All lives matter” is a platitude. We already know the theory that all lives matter. We (should) now know that when push comes to shove, many lives don’t. That is the context of the tragedy.
Sam Sawyer, SJ argues some great things, one of them being that #BlackLivesMatter “confronts us with our failure rather than congratulating us on having good motives.” This is not a movement that tells anybody that non-black lives do not matter, so we should all be fine with the name, unless we actually can’t handle focusing our empathy on somebody else. This is an opportunity for non-black people to acknowledge a grief that they may not ever know because it comes to those who experience social injustices that they may not, or that they may experience differently. It is an opportunity to resist the impulse to want our own feelings validated, just as we would if someone we knew was grieving for a private loss.
Confronting suffering that is not our own is a core element of compassion, but it has to be confronted as it is, not as it is when we abstract and generalize it to the point where we identify with it and it therefore belongs to us. When someone close to us is stricken with an illness that we don’t have, we don’t deny the illness—we work to make their suffering less. We can surely do the same thing when someone is deeply harmed by social injustice.
