The War From Over Here

The conflict in Israel and Gaza has reverberated in New York and beyond, colliding with America’s own conflicts and history.

- ZAK CHENEY-RICE

The Uses of Grief

In 1955, mamie till-mobley changed American politics by using grief as a catalyst for human rights. “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me,” she said about her son, Emmett, whose mutilated corpse she displayed publicly to prevent future lynchings. Mobley is the spiritual godmother of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose animating principle was that mourning in public could lead to egalitarian transformation. In making Black grief a spectacle that could not be ignored, she hoped that society might feel moved to start treating Black people as full human beings.

This approach might have underestimated the public’s tolerance for Black pain, but it got results. Major legislative achievements, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, would not exist without the public grief over the deaths of Emmett Till and Martin Luther King Jr. Modern efforts to curb police abuse have been propelled by images of Black bodies bleeding out on the street. Progress through pathos has become a defining expression of the Black freedom struggle’s noblest aspiration: a politics of indiscriminate regard for human life.