They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Throughout the text, Hanif Abdurraqib wonders what happens when typically private grief is shared publicly. Multiple essays explore the murders of unarmed Black men by police and “the force feeding of mugshots we get when a dead victim is Black” (53). There is a concern that the consumption of these murders as media can result in a performative response from the public, particularly when the grief is commercialized: “The daughter of a Black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father” (140). Abdurraqib is skeptical of tokenizing this woman’s public grief to sway the public one way or another.

On the other hand, the mere fact that one performs grief publicly—even calculatedly—does not necessarily undermine that grief’s authenticity. Abdurraqib praises artists who have taken their private grief and created art, including Future’s use of his very public breakup with Ciara to create a prolific and critically acclaimed series of albums and mixtapes. Part of the allure of the album is “that it is exceptionally difficult to be both public-facing and sad” (260).