In 2020, our world was engulfed in a world-wide pandemic. COVID-19 reminded the world that death is political – meaning that death is not just this inevitable occurrence that will happen to every human being, but that the circumstances of one’s death are highly predicated upon one’s social, economic and even racial status. In the United States of America, one’s assigned racial category weighs heavily on one’s cause of death.  This is further impacted by age, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion.  In the first months of the pandemic, Richmond, VA reported that of the first 15 Coronavirus deaths, 14 of them were African American. Later, the COVID Racial Tracker began to collect data that illustrated how Black Americans were dying at just about 1.5 times the rate of whites. The reason pundits all pointed to were pre-existing conditions that were compounded by COVID-19. The stark reality began to shed light on health disparities and structural inequalities that Black Americans face past and present.  Or as one American sociologist said, at the time, in an op-ed “when America catches coronavirus, Black people die.” 

But why? What can unpacking the racial disparities of COVID teach us about deathways as we zoom in on the experiences of Black Americans? 

In this talk, Dr. Kami Fletcher will discuss what it means to die while Black and how the bereaved use it as a call for social justice. She will discuss the histories and historical legacies of white supremacy that have abnormally shaped Black American deathways. Framed within the spiritual and secular norms surrounding death ideology, Dr. Fletcher will invite participants to view ritual as a call to arms and mourning as a radical act of remembrance that transforms grief into a powerful force of social justice and collective memory. Participants will be left to consider how through grief and mourning, Black communities demand justice while reclaiming humanity. Dr. Fletcher will engage those in attendance to interrogate how systems of power determine whose lives are publicly mourned and whose deaths are rendered invisible. She will push participants to grapple with the idea that mourning, in the Black experience, is not only personal but profoundly political—an act of resistance that insists on visibility, dignity, and justice.

Dr. Kami Fletcher

Associate Professor of African Diasporic History & Coordinator of Africana Studies

President of Collective for Radical Death Studies

www.kamifletcher.com

The pervasive denial of death in modern society has led to an unbalanced relationship with death—treating it as an existential problem to be avoided, rather than a natural part of the life cycle that should be openly discussed. A key barrier to meaningful conversations about death and dying is human’s unconscious tendency to suppress thoughts about death and dying. This underscores the need to (re-)discover strategies that encourage open, meaningful discussions about death without triggering resistance, suppression, or denial. One such strategy comes from ancient Buddhist and philosophical traditions, which proposed that practicing the art of dying can help reduce the denial of death and foster a greater appreciation for life. The Nine Cemetery Contemplations, for instance, encourage individuals to visualize the nine stages of decay of their own body. Building on these insights, this keynote will guide the audience through a practice of the art of dying via meditation. The participants’ experiences will be connected to findings from a recent art-meets-science project that explored the effects of the art installation This Body That Once Was You by Bakels and Mascini.

Prof. Enny Das

Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, the Netherlands