Stop Expecting Black Americans to Mourn White Supremacy

There is a strange and persistent demand that has followed Black Americans for generations: the expectation that we not only endure white supremacy but that we honor its losses. The fallen monuments. The so-called “heritage.” The leaders who weaponized laws, language, and violence to suppress us. When those symbols crumble, when racist voices are finally muted, the nation often turns to us for grace—for mourning, even. But why? Why should the descendants of the enslaved, the dispossessed, and the dehumanized be asked to weep for the death of their oppressor’s idols?

The Performance of Sympathy

Black Americans are consistently asked to perform a level of forgiveness and sympathy that is rarely, if ever, reciprocated. We are expected to bow our heads when statues of Confederate generals are lowered, as though their bronze likenesses represented anything other than the chains that bound our ancestors. We are asked to offer dignity when white supremacy loses a foothold, as if it ever extended dignity to us.

This expectation is not neutral—it is an extension of control. When we are asked to grieve the dismantling of white supremacist power structures, we are being asked to affirm their legitimacy. We are being asked to center the pain of those who benefitted from oppression, rather than honoring the centuries of trauma inflicted upon us. The performance of mourning is not just a demand for grace; it is a demand for complicity in the myth that white supremacy was once a noble order rather than a regime of terror.

The Psychological Toll

The expectation to mourn white supremacy carries a deep psychological toll. To grieve its losses is to gaslight ourselves—to weep for the collapse of a system designed to erase us. It forces us to shoulder the emotional labor of protecting the fragility of those invested in our oppression. It insists that we pause our healing in order to soothe their disorientation.

Grief is sacred. It belongs to those who have suffered true loss. And Black America has grieved enough. We have buried children killed in schools, elders murdered in churches, mothers and fathers stolen by a system that equates our very existence with threat. We have held funerals for lives cut short by police, prisons, policies, and poverty—all rooted in the architecture of white supremacy. To ask us to extend additional mourning to the very system that authored these deaths is not just cruel, it is obscene.

Historical Memory and Emotional Burden

Part of this expectation stems from how history has been framed in the United States. Textbooks once spoke of “states’ rights” rather than enslavement, of “compromise” rather than racial terror. White supremacy has long been narrated as heritage, as tradition, as something that must be handled delicately. And whenever those myths are challenged, Black Americans are asked to play the role of the nation’s conscience—to console, to forgive, to fold the oppressor back into the circle of sympathy.

But this emotional burden is not distributed equally. Rarely are white communities asked to mourn for the lives extinguished by racism with the same intensity. Rarely are they called to lament the everyday grief Black families endure. The imbalance is clear: our tears are expected to water their comfort, while our wounds remain unacknowledged.

Refusing the Burden

To refuse to mourn white supremacy is not cruelty—it is clarity. It is the refusal to confuse destruction with loss, the tearing down of violence with grief. It is to say that a toppled statue is not a dead loved one, and that accountability is not persecution.

Refusal is also an act of liberation. By declining to offer mourning, we unmask the manipulation behind the request. We reveal that the call for our sympathy is not about healing—it is about maintaining a hierarchy where even in collapse, white supremacy commands our emotional attention.

A Call to Reframe

We owe no eulogies to white supremacy. Its collapse does not deserve our tears. What deserves our attention is the world we are constructing in its absence. The gardens planted where monuments once stood. The children reading new narratives in classrooms where old lies were once recited. The communities gathering strength from each other, not the chains of the past.

This reframing is not about vengeance. It is about refusing to let the energy of our communities be consumed by the mourning of a system that never mourned for us. Instead, we invest in joy, in resilience, in futures where our children inherit abundance rather than generational grief.