Endless Mourning: Racial Melancholia, Black Grief, and the Transformative Possibilities for Racial Justice in Education

In this article, Justin Grinage investigates how black youth experience and contest racial trauma using racial melancholia, a psychoanalytic conception of grief, as a framework for understanding the nonpathologized endurance of black resistance to racism. Examining data from a yearlong ethnographic study, Grinage engages the notion that melancholia is needed for mourning to take place, a crucial distinction that engenders agency in relation to...