Abstract
Youth homicide rates have dropped significantly in the United States since the mid-1990s, but national victimization statistics provide no solace to parents of murdered children. A child’s fatal illness or accident can be horrific, but homicide is a unique form of loss that adds layers of complexity to the trauma. In The Politics of Sorrow, Daniel Martin slowly and succinctly walks the reader through families’ experiences in the aftermath of homicide and, through skillful application of interactionist theory and method, demonstrates how the micro-politics of managing grief differs significantly by race and class, marked by the institutional forces in which families are embedded.
Martin set out to understand if and how parents might transform tragedy into community action. Employing a “critical dramaturgy” (Young 1990), he interrogates the meaning of the homicide for parents and others left behind, how and why that meaning came about, and why some families are befriended and others targeted by officials of the state. The result is a sophisticated analysis of individual and group responses to violence, death, and grief within the context of identity and power relations. The micro-politics of homicide refer to “the exercise of power, influence and representation” in the interactions between families and outside functionaries including police, funeral directors, life insurance companies, school administrators, court officials, and community organizers. The homicide event—the victim’s involvement, and definitions of who and what they were at the time of involvement—is subjected to continual interpretation and construction by various parties, each with their own interests, lenses, and vocabularies. Interpretations are often contested, especially when the victim’s character is considered deviant or marginally reputable. Narrative analyses also expose limitations of group mobilization efforts.
Before delving into the emotionally-charged process of conducting participant observation and ethnographic interviews with members of two grief support groups, Martin spent several years engaged in the sometimes thorny, always sensitive, relational work necessary for a white male academic to gain access to anguished family members. Under the guidance of his key informant, “Brother” Martin “toured” the neighborhoods of Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, learning city history and internal politics. His description of his lengthy introduction—set against the backdrop of intense black-on-black youth violence and white police brutality toward black youth—provides readers with a context for the stories that follow.
The 57 interviewees belonged to two groups that present with a similar purpose but with vastly different interests, philosophies, and ideologies. The first group, Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters (MOMS), locally founded and steered in great measure by “Brother,” was exclusively African American and advanced a spiritually-based restorative justice approach to community street violence. Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) is a nonprofit, national organization whose organizational frame is that of retributive justice. The local branch consisted primarily of white, working- or middle-class members. Three simple but helpful appendices summarize the organizational and political characteristics of the two grief support organizations, and the race and sex of interview participants from each group.
The book methodically explores significant, phased, components of the homicide event—components that, for surviving family members, are an emotional and psychological blur. Participants’ description of the death notification, police investigation, funeral planning, and court procedures reveal the emotional processes that shape the micro-organization of homicide. Beginning with “The Social Organization of Bad News,” in which Martin examines how families first learn of their child’s killing (e.g., media, police, street news, relatives/friends), the analytic chapters demonstrate how profoundly class and race “as social forces in interaction” not only mold authorities’ initial response, but continue to affect all subsequent experiences as survivors attempt to cope with a new reality. For example, white working- and middle-class families, and African American upper-middle-class families were generally afforded formal police notification, including the services of a clergy member to offer immediate nurturing and grief counseling. Poor and African American families who often lived in violent neighborhoods that police avoided suffered the ambiguity of hearing of their child’s death through informal, street-level networks that may or may not be verifiable. Narrative analyses expose additional distinctions in the experiences of group members and the problematic nature of the processes in which individuals engaged. All families were operating in a state of shock and intense grief, but depending on their social location in terms of race and class, and to a lesser extent gender, some already vulnerable families were forced to confront a host of structural, obstructive machinations that compounded their grief.
The expert and extensive use of interview data is the heart of the book—gut wrenching, raw, and reflective of participants’ psychological upheaval. Especially poignant are descriptions of activities families were forced into after notification of the homicide and the attendant emotional work. Victims’ mothers often assumed the role of caring for others. “My husband says that he felt that I was sort of like a zombie, but that I went through the whole process in a way that people thought I was, you know, the real strong one. I was the one that was holding everybody else up and I didn’t really fall apart until everything was over . . . .” (p. 64).
Families sought to normalize and manage the identity of victims, a process that sometimes was in opposition to the image police and the media presented. A member of MOMS whose unarmed son was shot by police objected to official accounts of the killing. “My son was an athlete <pause> going to college. He got into some trouble once, but he was <pause> it was a misdemeanor. They [police] tried to say [in the local media] it was a felony” (p. 87).
The mother attempts to fight the “oppressive othering” of powerful social institutions that constructed a narrative based on hegemonic definitions of black (especially male) youth. In other cases where a deviant lifestyle compelled even friends and relatives to assign some degree of blame to the victim, family members were selective in constructing an acceptable postmortem identity. “He wasn’t a bad kid. He always had respect for his elders. Every time I see him even after he was wrong . . . every time I see him he’d say ‘Hi mama how ya doin?’ . . . and he made sure he came to all our family barbecues and he had his friends over” (p. 104). This mother’s “furtive account” suppresses discrediting information about her son’s role in the underground economy and identifies him as a loving and caring individual. In their statements, grieving mothers sought to present an alternate image of the deceased in order to derive some comfort and reduce the stigma of their loss.
The Politics of Sorrow draws readers into a world nobody wants to inhabit, but tragically, too many already do. It is an important study that shows how definitions, identity, and interaction are manipulated to privilege some groups and subordinate others. The analysis of how emotion is “organizationally scripted, formulated, and used” also discloses the complicated and paradoxical nature of collective mobilization efforts; in the context of deep sorrow, MOMS and POMC members were generally nonresponsive to leaders’ calls for political activism. The book will be of interest to social movement scholars and students of sociology and criminology concerned with symbolic interaction, race and class, violence, loss, and trauma.