Brothers in Grief: The Stages of Grieving for a School and its Students Following Three Shooting Deaths of Black Teenage Boys

During my two years of ethnographic research in an all-boys, all-Black Philadelphia high school, three students died in separate incidents of community gun violence, impacting dozens of their friends and classmates and the entire school community. My dissertation argues that grief, though understudied in this context, is a central dimension in the social lives of youth—particularly in the lives of those whose race, gender, and class position them to experience the highest rates of violence. My research exposes the interactional and institutional mechanisms through which the grief that follows gun violence tangibly impacts Black adolescent boys’ school engagement, relationships with peers and teachers, and ideas about their own futures—as well as the consequences of our society’s too-frequent neglect of Black boys’ emotional lives.

I propose a three-stage theory of institutional and personal grief within the school after a student’s death. The stages—easy hard, hard hard, and hidden hard—highlight a progression over time in how friends experience and express their grief and how school policies, practices, and individual teachers’ behaviors support and constrain students’ recovery. Drawing on evidence from over 600 hours of ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews with nearly 100 students and adults, social media analysis, and students’ school records, I show, on the one hand, the efforts of administrators and teachers to care for and support grieving students and, on the other hand, the structural challenges they face dealing with boys’ emotions in educational spaces designed to promote and maintain order and respond to the perceived “crisis” of Black boys’ education.

My research uncovers layers of conflict between institutional mourning practices, designed first to collectively recognize shared loss and then to renormalize academic routines and classroom life, and students’ unresolved (and frequently concealed) grief. Using the framework of racialized and gendered emotion work, I analyze the particularities of Black boys’ individual and peer group grieving rituals and assess the costs to their emotional and educational trajectories. My attention to boys’ regular social media posts, in particular, reveals how the medium functions as a key vehicle for social solidarity and public emotional expression otherwise stigmatized by stubborn norms of racialized masculinity.

In the conclusion, I offer preliminary recommendations for how urban schools might help students productively transform their grief into grievance and social action through curricular and cultural reforms to center student agency and the development of critical consciousness. These strategies, I argue, are what made possible youth activist movements like the one that emerged after the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In urban schools coping with the effects of seemingly unrelenting neighborhood gun violence, similar strategies might help youth transform the emotional numbness they report into hope, healing, and social change.

Articles stemming from my dissertation research include a 2018 article in School Psychology Quarterly and a forthcoming article in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Additionally, my research was featured in a January 2020 Philadelphia Inquirer story, and I collaborated on a short documentary film, Our Philadelphia, which will premiere in mid-June, with a team of young people from Philadelphia to explore their experiences of losing friends to gun violence.

Nora Gross is a 2020 Doctoral Recipient in Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences, and Education, Culture, and Society, Graduate School of Education. In Fall 2020 she will be Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

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