Grief lands us in unexpected places. And it’s how we create collective room for processing it that allows us to journey through our grief in ways that make it more bearable, especially related to unnecessary losses.

Yet it still felt surprising to see my edited anthology “Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief” (@AKPress, with poignant design by @eff_charm, including cover art honoring David Ware, a Black man murdered on January 23, 2007, by police in Ypsilanti, Michigan) in a literal room in a museum—a respite room, to be exact.

The term “respite” refers to offering temporary care in the form of a period of rest and relief. Meaning it’s only an interval in the grinding violence of, in this case, anti-Black racism.

Such respite feels crucial in the context of this museum exhibition, “An Archaeology of Silence,” being held now at the @deyoungmuseum. The exhibit is described thusly: “Artist Kehinde Wiley’s new body of paintings and sculptures confronts the silence surrounding systemic violence against Black people through the visual language of the fallen figure. … [Deaths] are transformed into a powerful elegy of resistance. The resulting paintings of figures struck down, wounded, or dead, referencing iconic paintings of mythical heroes, martyrs, and saints, offer a haunting meditation on the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism.”

Mourning and honoring the systemic loss of Black life should include some comfort, some relief. But how could this not be temporary given the lengthy, genocidal history of anti-Blackness along with the ongoing brutality of white supremacy, policing and prison systems, and increasingly outright fascism?

The choice of “respite” for a room filled with grief-related books and, I imagine, some breathing space from the heaviness of this exhibition feels appropriate: there can be no real, sustained relief in this world. How we mourn, though, has an intimate, inseparable relation to how we go about fighting for social transformation—or it should. Our ancestors, so many of them still existing as “unquiet ghosts” far from being at peace, demand no less.

#RebelliousMourning
#NoMoreStolenLives
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief

https://www.akpress.org/rebellious-mourning.html

(Thanks to Steve Rhodes for sending me this photo)

We don’t need videos.

As the Ayotzinapa 43 families have been saying since 2014, after 43 beloveds in Iguala, Guerrero, were disappeared and likely murdered, including by police, “We want them back alive.”

Meaning: they never should have been killed.

We shouldn’t need videos to somehow prove that we want every single person murdered-by-cop to be alive. That their names should still be spoken to them, here in this world. That each and every person assassinated by police was loved and lovable, and never deserved that kind of death.

We shouldn’t need videos as evidence that there are no good cops.

The proof is in the grieving people left behind, the uprisings fueled by rage and sorrow, the abolitionist and stop cop cities/academies organizing and direct action, the myriad forms of solidarity, the murals and tags on urban walls, the DIY altars.

“We want them back alive.”

For that to have full meaning, we want and need and fight for a world without police.

#AllCopsAreBad #ACAB
#NoMoreStolenLives
#CareNotCops
#AllComradesAreBeautiful
#TowardAWorldWithoutPolice
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon

(photo: downtown storefront boarded up with plywood and then tagged with graffiti asserting #NoGoodCops and #Fuck12 as seen on stolen Ho-Chunk lands in so-called Madison, WI, after the windows were smashed during the George Floyd uprising in 2020)