The Black community experiences a higher rate of disenfranchised grief — where an individual’s loss and grief is unrecognized, stigmatized, or socially invalidated — an expert explained during a grief support meeting.

“One of the things that disenfranchised grief acknowledges is that the more minority identity that you carry, the more likely it is that your grief is going to be unacknowledged,” said Doneila McIntosh, a doctoral student in family social science at the University of Minnesota. “And the more the circumstances of the death are stigmatized — AIDS-related death, homicide, suicide — these deaths will also go unacknowledged by wide society and the community.”

A crowd of more than 100 local professionals gathered last month at Collingwood Presbyterian Church, 2108 Collingwood Blvd., to learn how disenfranchised grief and the lack of empathy can negatively influence grief support of African Americans.

Hosted by Good Grief of Northwest Ohio, a grief support organization, the presentation worked to identify how African American grief is disenfranchised and its effect on Black communities.

“Disenfranchised grief denies grievers the right to grieve in the manner that they need or choose to grieve without the interference of others,” Ms. McIntosh said. “Death experiences that are stigmatized can leave a lot of gaps in terms of support.”

With a master of divinity in theological studies and a master of arts in counseling psychology, in addition to her research, Ms. McIntosh presented a culmination of her experience as a chaplain and a therapist.

“I trained to work with people in the midst of their grief or trauma, their shame, their pain, but I had not a single class focused on grief and loss,” Ms. McIntosh said of her studies. 

The stigmatization of grief is sometimes intertwined, consciously or unconsciously, with racial bias and racist ideology, Good Grief organizers said. As African Americans have faced discrimination throughout U.S. history, there is a negative trickle-down effect on grief support — or the lack thereof.

“What we see today is a reflection of history, but because we’re so disconnected with history, and we say what happened in the past doesn’t matter anymore, this is why we continue to see this over and over and over,” she said, expressing the importance of looking back to move forward.

“The higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths compared to white Americans in the last two decades,” Ms. McIntosh said. “This is a problem.”

The higher mortality rates among Blacks has less to do with their genetics than with the country’s long history of health care disparities and discrimination with educational, housing, and job opportunities within the African Amrican community, she said.

With death so rampant in the Black community, it is often seen as the norm with grieving subsequently deemed unwarranted, unnecessary, and therefore unacknowledged.

The interactive format of the presentation allowed those in attendance to weigh in with their personal grief experiences. University of Toledo student Ayanna Jordan recounted her experience of disenfranchised grief after a high school classmate was killed.

“It was huge. We literally watched it happen live on Snapchat,” she said. “The next day when we went to school, there was such tension and grief in the air.”

Because of the nature of the student’s death, school personnel informed the students that attendance at the funeral would be penalized, unexcused, and assignments would be docked, she said.

“I was a junior. It happened in April, and I will never forget that because there was testing going on,” she said. “They did not care.”

Not only penalized but with the lack of grief support, she and some of the other students struggled to bounce back during senior year, Ms. Jordan said.

“But on other ends, when other classmates were in car accidents [and such], it was different,” she said. “They were allowed to leave school early or go to a balloon release.”

A starting point to understanding the issue is the fostering of potentially difficult conversations about grief and the vital need for grief support, Ms. McIntosh said.

“Especially for African Americans, we have to talk about this more and bring more awareness to this reality,” she said, adding that mental health providers would greatly benefit from the incorporation of grief education.

“I used to work as a chaplain and I kept recognizing and seeing patterns, but I had no idea the actual prevalence of the compounded loss in the African American community,” Ms. McIntosh said.

“I think there's this inherent assumption that young kids don’t grieve, or this assumption that they’re incapable of understanding the full brunt of the loss. And we know that’s not actually true, that kids can see it and perceive it,” she said.

If a child experiences a loss at a very young age — especially if it’s an immediate family member — and it goes unaddressed, that loss can impact them for the remainder of their lives, she said.

Disenfranchised grief research reveals the way to minimize adverse effects is by expanding their capacity and to help children understand their responses to grief are expected and normal.

“We have to normalize that a child can have rage, and that’s OK,” Ms. McIntosh said. “And that rage should not adversely impact them at school, especially when they’re in a Black body.”

Good Grief of Northwest Ohio encouraged the community to learn more about how grief can impact young people — particularly African American kids — how it has played out historically, and how they can do better in the future.

“In general, kids’ voices aren’t often heard, and they’re especially not heard when they’re feeling grief,” said Dorothy Mockensturm, managing director of the grief support organization. “As a society in general, we’re just not good at talking about death and grief because it’s an uncomfortable subject.”

As unacknowledged grief can have a tremendous impact on the lives of both children and adults, grief counselors should strive to address the whole person and along with all of their experiences, and not just the grief, she said. 

First Published December 1, 2023, 5:00 p.m.