A Conversation: the Impact of Grief on Students and Society
Editors’ note:
What follows is a conversation between Dr. Kim Tabari, Malkia Devich-Cyril, and Paige Desmore on the contexts and experiences of grief and its impact on students and our society.
Dr. Kim Tabari is the External Affairs Director at the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI), and Malkia Devich-Cyril, known to many in the world as Mac, is the Fall 2024 Scholar Activist in Residence at ERI working on their first nonfiction narrative about the ways in which communities and movements are shaped by the experiences of grief. Paige Desmore is an Administrator in the Educational Transformation Office at Los Angeles Unified School District, working on centering Black and other marginalized students within her school district. She is part of the LAUSD Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP). Paige is also working on her Doctorate in Educational Leadership for Justice.
The goal of their conversation was to understand how students experience and process grief, and in what ways adults around them show up to help them with that processing. They are thinking and talking about grief as expansive, not limited to death and dying, but how we’re forced to grieve in ways that satisfy oppressive structures or policies in our school systems. Many of us are experiencing this right now as grieving the loss of American democracy.
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Kim: So, let’s just jump right in. How would you all define grief as it relates to K-12 students? What are some common properties you can think of? And Paige, I would love to start with you.
Paige: I would say, well, this was an interesting question because of students’ understanding of what grief is may not be what the definition of grief actually is, and so I think students move through – it’s a hard time being a kid.I think students really don’t know that they’re dealing with a loss of a lot of things. So, grief isn’t necessarily just the loss of a person, but like you said, it could be the loss of many things.
Right now, it’s the loss of democracy. It could be the loss of certain rights on campuses when certain school rules are trying to be applied, or dress code is applied, or the way you wear your hair is – you know, there’s restrictions around that. That is a type of grief, but do students understand the behaviors they’re exhibiting are actually grief? I think of it as sadness, rebelling, sometimes misbehaving in class or what we consider as the norm of misbehaving in class, depending on what the teacher’s, standards are. Anything that’s opposite of their usual behaviour is a sign of grief.
Kim: Thank you for that. Mac, I know you’ve talked about the importance of grief in movements. How do you see that playing out for students as you think about grief and students?
Mac: Thank you for asking. You know, I think about grief as any and every reaction and response to loss. Sometimes what that means for academics, and I mean academics who study loss, not – not teachers in schools with young people. They focus on the part that is about sorrow. For a lot of young people, I think that grief manifests as anger, and not necessarily as our typical understanding of sorrow, and here are developmental reasons for that, among other reasons, but that’s the first thing. Grief isn’t only sorrow.
I think we need to expand our understanding of what grief is, and what loss is.? I think the other thing is that there are many types of grief, because there are different types of losses. For example, for many of our undocumented students, they face ambiguous loss when folks are being snatched up by ICE and taken away and students don’t know where their parents are, or parents don’t know where their kids are. Or students lose their friends out of the blue, because they’ve been snatched up by this deportation machine, which is about to get more vicious.
Similarly, Black children (and other children) who have family members in prison, deal with this ambiguous loss when someone dies in custody, whether it’s in the custody of a jail or in the custody of police. Often you don’t know what happened. And so this ambiguous loss, where we just don’t know what happened, you know, is often a kind of loss held by our students. I think students also deal with loss that is disenfranchised, which leads to a grief that is disembodied and mourning that is criminalized, and I’ll just say a little bit about that. If their losses are disenfranchised, meaning that they’re not witnessed, they’re not acknowledged. For example, during the pandemic, millions of young people lost a parent, but disproportionately Black and indigenous Southeast Asian, children lost family members, and yet there was not really a particular acknowledgement of that disparity within many schools. And so, we have this huge number of children, many of whom were pushed into the foster care system as a result of losing one or both caregivers, and our educational institutions didn’t acknowledge that. So, you know,that is an example of that disenfranchised grief where…where your loss is simply unacknowledged. Similarly we have disproportionate percentages of our family members in prison, you know what I’m saying? Again, losses that are not acknowledged.
And that leads young people to have a more disembodied grief where they’re not able to access or understand exactly what’s going on with them, you know, and not able to move through the various developmental processes that grief has for us. Grief is evolutionary, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a wonderful, evolutionary process that allows us to adapt to change, but when we’re not allowed to do that, you know, it creates lasting harm. That leads me to that last part, which is criminalized, right? We’re not allowed to go through that process. We’re not allowed to mourn. For example, schools that have denied students the right to protest, or schools that have denied Day of the Dead celebrations. All of this is a criminalization of their mourning and a disruption of their grief, and this is some of what grief can look like and how grief can be experienced by students in schools.
And the last thing I will say is, because of this, because schools are such a site of loss, I think they have an extra responsibility to democratize grief.
Paige: I hear that maybe the students don’t think of it as grief, and then their actions tell us that, okay, they’re grieving, and they just don’t have the terminology for that.
Kim: And as we live in this era of mass loss, both on stateside and just global loss, whether it’s the pandemic or some other loss, talk about what collective grief looked like for students over the last couple years.
Paige: Collective grief, I kind of just interpreted that, you know, in my own way. I immediately thought of social media, which is both good and evil. I’m gonna go back to how tough it is being a kid these days, because everything is on social media. There’s so much access to everything. Students really shouldn’t have access to everything they’re being exposed to, but at the same time, it allows them to have a direct connection, a bond to other people who are grieving and to understand how to grieve, and that’s actually what it means. So when things happen, for example, I’m sure something will happen eventually now that we have Trump voted back into office. It warms my heart to see young people out there gathering together at a protest, marching with signs, refusing to move out of spaces and just staying there because that is a form of expressing grief. They’re expressing a form of loss, and so when I think of an era of mass loss, this is a loss for many people–that we’re gonna have someone in office that does not represent people of color, and how are people expressing that? Through protest. So, I think when people are just, you know, all over the place and – and really don’t have a way of physically being able to be with each other or maybe don’t have a way of communicating with each other because folks just live all over the place now. It’s not like back in the day when all of our families lived within a square block. Now everyone is everywhere, and how are people able to express their grief and be able to bond during tough times?
Kim: So, my follow up question for you, Paige, is this is a particularly challenging time–and as we think about the collective grief happening around us–how are restorative justice teachers making space for students or teachers in general? What are some of the things that folks are asked to do at this time?
Paige: Yes. It is exactly what you just said, just allowing the space. Sometimes schools are very regimented: “We gotta get the lessons done. We have to get the lessons done. We have to take this test. We have testing coming up.” None of that is going to happen unless we allow students to go through a very natural, human process, such as breathing. So, I always encourage RJ teachers to give students space. Meaning, they need to be out of the classroom for a few minutes. If there’s something that’s affecting a whole class, put the books away, put the paper away, and let’s have a chat and really process how we’re feeling. When I was an administrator at a school site, we went through the George Floyd murder, then we went through the Breonna Taylor murder, all during the pandemic, and I was the one who told my principal, “Look, we can’t just keep going. You cannot insist on us doing this math PD (professional Development) right now, because you’re not reading the room. We have to pause and allow people to express what they’re feeling. You have a staff of some Black people, and they have Black students. And we are humans. And we are feeling a certain kind of way, and we will feel a different certain kind of way if you force us to sit in this math PD.”
And so, from then, it was just a huge lesson that we have to allow people to be people. Stop, pause, take your time. It’s okay to feel how you’re feeling. Let’s talk it out. Asking: What do we need to do? You have to validate how people are feeling. It’s not always gonna be about academics.
Kim: Thank you for sharing with such clarity. Any additional thoughts, Mac, to this question about what collective grief looks like for students?
Mac: I’ll just add a couple of things. First of all, the way we define collective grief is generally as a shared response to when a community or a nation experiences a significant loss or a tragedy. For Black folk in America, our community, regardless of where we live, we have a shared experience. We have a shared history and we have a shared social status. Sometimes I think folks forget that students are part of these larger communities, you know what I mean?
Students are immigrants. They’re indigenous, you know what I mean? They’re poor. They’re in particular socioeconomic groups, that group that is suffering under conditions of loss. Part of the nature of oppression is to force loss upon you.
And so that’s one piece, is that our students are always suffering some type of collective losses inherent to their shared identity as oppressed people for many – not every student.
I think the other piece is when we say “an era of mass loss”, what do we mean?
We’re talking about an era of gun violence with a government that refuses to do what it must do to stop it.
We’re talking about an era of police violence, but that has been something that we’ve lived with for a long time. What’s changed is the amount of state power and the national scope of it and our ability to witness it on social media. That vigilante violence which is something that has grown over the last ten years and is going to grow more now under a Trump administration, that adds to it.
We are talking about the experiences of COVID and we’ll have more illnesses like that. We will face pandemics again. And finally, we have obviously our climate emergency. So, all of this stuff is happening at the same time, you know what I mean? And our poor children –they have to navigate all of that. So really understanding the nature of the mass losses that our children are living through is critical.
Lastly, I mentioned that schools are a site of loss, for example, school shootings. But also they are a place where folks come together. They’re a place where contradiction occurs.
They have become a site of loss, which means they also have to become a site of grief and healing. We have to understand them as sacred sites. So how do we do that?
- We have to give these students opportunities for public mourning;
- We have to encourage and protect students right to collective action; and
- We have to allow students space for the grief process.
One of the most healing parts of grieving is belonging, and democracy as a political institution is supposed to enshrine belonging. So, collective grief is an inherent part of many of our children’s experience, and the criminalization of that collective grief is also an inherent part of many of our children’s experience. Our schools can be sites of transformation if we let them.
Kim: Yes, thank you. That – that makes me think of an article I just read (Feeling Carcerality: How Carceral Seepage Shapes Racialized Emotions by Dr. Uriel Serrano) that highlighted how students are responding to this notion of ‘carceral seepage’ where the violence is seeping into their lives in such a way that it’s just become normal. And normalizing this, ‘seepage’ and that process. The era of mass loss is unbelievable that young people have to deal with all of this all at the same time and – be on time for school, and do their work, and sit still all day long.
Your comments also makes me think about the challenges that our Black students in particular face, in many of our school districts where, you know, they’re academically struggling. I do a lot of work as a parent/guardian advocate in the Long Beach Unified School District, so this work is near and dear to my heart.
Paige, you’re part of BSAP, and in many of the school districts across California, when you look at the data, Black students are doing poorly in their academic outcomes as a group. Are there things that the Restorative Justice teachers are particularly paying attention to when it comes to Black students?
Paige: Yes, not just the Restorative Justice teachers, but BSAP as a whole. We are guided by the work of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, basing our work on her five pursuits of teaching which are: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality, and joy. We are trying to move educators towards teaching differently and allowing white students to learn differently, because it’s no coincidence that Black students are not meeting the standards of public education.
In my humble opinion, it’s because public education doesn’t understand how Black students learn. And of course, we get a lot of push back from teachers and non-POC parents.
And it can’t be generations and generations of Black people who aren’t succeeding. At some point, you know it must be the system. Eventually we have to look at the system and change it to better serve our kids. There’s a lot of professional developments that we’re doing around allowing students to express what they’re learning differently, looking at student behaviors not just as being defiant. Looking at what subjective behaviors mean when teachers or other adults in the school are using language such as, “Oh, he won’t stay in his seat.” “She’s always talking out of turn. She’s being defiant.” Those are very subjective behavior language that we use to describe behaviors that could mean this child is bored to death in your class.
Or they’re too intelligent for you, and they need a different teacher, or you’re not meeting up to the student’s standards. So, these are all things that we’re trying to communicate to our schools that they’re just not doing it for Black students in particular.
Period. It’s just not working.
Kim: And thinking about grief as a survival tool, I think Mac mentioned that earlier, what would some of that look like?
Paige: I want to agree on what you said earlier about anger. I think that’s one of the most common tools that our students use. Not knowing that it’s actually about grief, but being angry. They’re angry about so many things that are happening in the world, that they’re not being acknowledged as people. We keep treating students, Black students, as if they are not human beings. They’re people just like everybody else. We tend to move through students not acknowledging where they are in their developmental stage, considering their age and sometimes grief, depending on their age, is very appropriate for that age. We want this cookie cutter of what grief looks like, and not acknowledging what grief might look like or how it manifests depending on the age of the student and what that student has already experienced.
Some students are having a layer, and a layer, and a layer, and a layer of grief and trauma, and they’re expected to come to school and act like nothing happens. That’s a bad sign.
If a student comes to school the next day after someone’s been taken, someone just passed away, and they’re understanding that their grandma is gonna have to be deported to wherever, that is not a good sign for a student to come back to school as if nothing had happened. So, again, when we don’t give kids the tools, or the strategies, or even the space to just express how they’re feeling, it’s going to manifest in ways that are gonna interfere with learning, such as anger, defiance, and causing distractions because we aren’t giving them the space.
Kim: Anything to add, Mac, thinking about how Black students may use grief as a survival tool?
Mac: It’s important for us to understand that Black children experience grief differently from other children. Black children, indigenous children, Arab children, immigrant children, their experiences vary. But I’m gonna talk about Black children. Their experience is unique because one, the quantity of loss they experience is different. The frequency of loss they experience is different. The collective nature of their grief is different. They face a disproportionate vulnerability to loss. So, their whole relationship to loss and grief is, as I mentioned earlier, endemic to their identity.
So, grief has always been a survival tool for Black children and Black families. If you think about grief not simply as sorrow, not simply as loss, but as adaptation, you know, as the way we engage and think about transformation, as the way we find meaning after loss, that’s what grief is. And so students use grief to find meaning after loss. And it’s part of what I think makes the restorative justice process so powerful when it is rooted in an understanding of grief. It moves us from loss to meaning, from isolation to connection, and that’s the purpose to me. That is the purpose of grief. Black students have been doing that for centuries, being able to face off with loss by coming together.
There’s a reason it’s the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), because most of our movements began in schools. Many of our movements began with young people in the streets responding to loss– where they turned their grief into grievance, and so that is who we are.
Paige: Yes, our children have always led the way in terms of transforming our grief into social movements.
Kim: Yes, and doing this with love. It reminds me of something that bell hooks wrote in her book: All About Love: New Visions. She said “to be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.”
One example I can offer in my role as a parent/guardian advocate is in LBUSD at Wilson High School. My son was part of a group called Young Black Scholars, a group that makes intentional space for Black students to showcase their scholarship, and bring them together to celebrate, and be in community with one another. It is such a popular program that the Long Beach school district was invited to present it to Superintendents from across the country. I remember it being such a shining example of their potential as students. I also knew many of the students and some of them were also suffering tremendous personal loss, but they get up every day and go to school and look forward to being in community with one another. And so, a tremendous amount of adaptation, as you mentioned earlier, to find meaning in their lives.
So Mac, you mentioned restorative justice, so let’s turn there for a second, and thinking about how restorative justice invites grief into its process?
Mac: I am not an expert in restorative justice so I defer to those who are, but what I have witnessed is that restorative justice, its whole purpose is about moving folks from loss to meaning. When a violation occurs, a loss takes place, and without a grief process, we immediately move into resentment. This is what we see happening in America, right? Americans refuse to grieve. Americans are prevented from grieving. Americans are denied grief, and so when that happens for children, for students, for young people, they move immediately into resentment, right? And they move immediately into blame, or into rage, and the more powerless you feel, the more you want to violate in return, you know?
And so restoring folks to power, restoring folks’ sense of agency, a an empowered process where they are healing as a way forward. Honestly, I find restorative justice to be a grief process. It is a form of grieving, a way of taking folks through a grief process together so that what they can do is witness the loss, their own and each other’s. And that process of witnessing, of connection and support, it restores belonging. It restores safety. It restores dignity.
I don’t even like the term ‘restorative justice’ because justice can’t be restored. It’s either there or it’s not. But, what can be restored is belonging, safety, and dignity.
Paige: Ditto to all of what Mac shared. And I too have an issue with it being called ‘restorative justice.’ The way we just keep throwing that word ‘justice’ around – is kind of losing the true meaning of what it is. But I totally agree about the processing– we’re not allowing the process of grief. We’re not allowing the process of expressing emotions. We’re not allowing the process of even helping students understand what it means to go through a process and validating that it’s okay to have those feelings.
The time in schools is very compacted, and there’s very little time given to things that are very human. School districts talk a lot about social/emotional lessons, and they have a theme of the month, and if a student is feeling this way, we’re gonna do this. If students have a conflict, we’re gonna do this, but where is it actually embedded in the classroom? Most of the time it’s not. Academics are here, and every human behavior is over there. We’re always talking about modeling behavior for students but we’re not actually doing it, so students are expected to just know when they’re experiencing a loss, or they’re angry about something, or they see something, like someone live on Facebook being murdered, they don’t know how to respond to these things. I think you said earlier Mac, there’s so much trauma happening, and they’re seeing it and being exposed to it so much, it’s almost becoming normal to them.
Where does that go? It’s gonna manifest in some kind of way here or there, but where are we allowing it to process properly so that when these kids become adults, they’re not still reacting on something that happened to them or that they witnessed when they were 15 years old? And, especially for our Black students, not understanding microaggressions. Our Black students experience a higher percentage of microaggressions per day, more than any other race, but they don’t know that that’s what it is, or where to put it, or how to deal with it, which is then compounding all the other trauma that they’re experiencing.
Kim: Thank you for sharing and bringing that into the conversation. I agree that microaggressions are quite evident for students and there is research to prove this point. The term was coined in 1970 by a Black psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce, and refers to common experiences with mundane, everyday racism experienced by Black people. Folks talk about microaggressions happening to adults at work, but absolutely children are feeling that and don’t have the language.
Thank you both so much for this beautiful conversation around grief and how it affects our students and our society at large. Mac, we look forward to reading your upcoming book on grief in 2025.
As the late poet/author June Jordan offered, “Love is a powerful force that can heal and transform.” I wish that opportunity to heal and transform for all our students and our communities, in order for them to thrive.