Introduction

This chapter was supposed to be a critical inquiry into grief and the social media campaign known as #prayforparis. We were going to carefully review the relevant literature and how this campaign seemed to take discursive precedence over mourning for the concurrent loss of life in Yemen, Syria and Sri Lanka. We were then going to introduce a concept we call grief supremacy, detailing how it works and perpetuates certain campaigns, practices and grievabilities.

However, just as we started to knit this chapter together, COVID-19 happened. As has been told a thousand times in the media, COVID-19 began as a virus, claiming lives at an astounding rate, but it was only when it entered white places that it took on pandemic status, affecting and claiming white Western lives of convenience and accumulation, possibly forever. Thus, our focus changed, and we turned away from #prayforparis and toward this moment of death, loss and what we see as the problematic exalting of white loss and grief. Indeed, as we argue, it has never been more pressing to make clear how white things such as white supremacy and its “pillars” such as capitalism, consumerism, individualism and meritocracy are operating through and with discourses and narratives on grief and loss. Consequently, in this chapter our goal is to introduce and then detail what we call grief supremacy, a co-option of grief/loss by the political and ideological system that is white supremacy. Grief supremacy elevates and amplifies white loss, white grief and makes the rules around grievability or which lives and bodies are worthy of which grief responses. Based in literature on grief, whiteness and critical approaches to racism such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), this chapter details what grief supremacy is and how it operates in three sites: (1) the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), (2) in local (Canadian) bereavement leave policies and, finally, (3) in this time of pandemic loss and death.

As critical thinkers, observers and active grievers, we come to this humbly and with no claims of conclusion and comprehensiveness. Rather, this chapter serves to initiate a conversation about loss and grief under new and evolving circumstances and consequently address a range of sites where grief is socially and institutionally managed.