African American Grief

by Paul C. Rosenblatt

African American Grief is a unique contribution to the field, both as a professional resource for counselors, therapists, social workers, clergy, and nurses, and as a reference volume for thanatologists, academics, and researchers. This work considers the potential effects of slavery, racism, and white ignorance and oppression on the African American experience and conception of death and grief in America. Based on interviews with 26 African-Americans who have faced the death of a significant person in their lives, the authors document, describe, and analyze key phenomena of the unique African-American experience of grief. The book combines moving narratives from the interviewees with sound research, analysis, and theoretical discussion of important issues in thanatology as well as topics such as the influence of the African-American church, gospel music, family grief, medical racism as a cause of death, and discrimination during life and after death.

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2005

Reviews

[Luke Hillier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a helpful ethnographic study drawing from interviews with 26 African Americans about grief in hopes of discerning consistent and particular trends related to the Black American experience of coping with the death of a loved one. Not to discredit the obvious value of qualitative research over quantitative, but I do wonder how much stronger this would be alongside more robust quantitative data surveying a larger sample size. Given that no group is able to be represented accurately as a monolith, this made for interesting conclusions in which some interviewees had perspectives that were in contradiction with others (e.g. African Americans face social pressures to be strong in grief and restrain emotional responsiveness vs. African Americans are significantly more emotionally affected by grief than white people who may be less capable or less willing to experience strong emotions, publicly or at all). Having a stronger sense of data-driven trends accompanied by qualitative anecdotes fleshing out narratives that are both consistent with and contradictory to those trends would have made this feel a bit more conclusive. But, as it stands, it is still a valuable resource that begins to articulate some of the unique elements of African American grief, and is a necessary corrective to the tendency of researchers on grief to universalize the white American experience.