Overview

A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss. JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys' Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister's home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun's untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys' Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected. Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends' and classmates' deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school's educational mission and teachers' and administrators' fraught attempts to care for students' emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change. A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.

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9780226820873

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Reviews

"""In this moving account of the impact of gun violence on urban Black boys and their communities, Nora Gross shares hard lessons about the collective impact of gun violence on emotional life, community bonds, learning, and more. Written with care and deep respect, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the impact of gun violence on urban school communities."" -- Natasha Warikoo, author of 'Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools' ""Brothers in Grief, an account of the afterlives of gun violence at one high school for Black boys, is simply astonishing. Nora Gross bears witness to these young men as they grieve together and privately, and to the consequences when the school tries to move forward from tragic loss. More than a needed portrait of the hidden tolls of gun violence and of the emotional worlds of Black boys, Brothers in Grief is a model of responsible, reflexive ethnography."" -- Freeden Blume Oeur, author of 'Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Schools' ""Brothers in Grief is a powerful, searing account of the impact of unceasing, premature death as a result of gun violence on the lives of Black teenage boys forever marked by the losses they are forced to endure. In a society that deems their lives eminently disposable and that largely fails to acknowledge their grief, this invaluable ethnographic account takes us inside a year in the life of students at a Philadelphia charter school who must contend with the loss of their friends and classmates and what it means to survive them."" -- Juliet Hooker, author of 'Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss'"

"""In this moving account of the impact of gun violence on urban Black boys and their communities, Nora Gross shares hard lessons about the collective impact of gun violence on emotional life, community bonds, learning, and more. Written with care and deep respect, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the impact of gun violence on urban school communities."" -- Natasha Warikoo, Tufts University"

Author Information

Nora Gross is assistant professor of education at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is coeditor of Care-Based Methodologies: Reimagining Qualitative Research with Youth in US Schools and has produced several documentary films.  

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