ASALH Conference Panel - Death and Grief Among Black Communities
The proposed panel dovetails with this year’s conference theme for ASALH "African American labor." While it is true that “Black labor has been central to political, economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations,” the hardships of that labor and the intricacies of Black lived experiences have also led to all types of death. As people of African descent continue to be accosted on multiple fronts, examining both our historical and present-day experiences around the subject of death is an undertaking worth engaging. In recent years, conversations about the uncomfortable subject of death were facilitated by the pandemic, and several studies have documented the disproportionate mortality rate from COVID-19 for Black people in the United States.