In Black Grief/White Grievance, Hooker has written a most nuanced, clear analysis of the contemporary American political landscape. In sum, Hooker's book is about the losses democracy expects us to endure, but how unevenly those losses are distributed by race. In this case, white individuals expect dominance and deference, even when they lose, and Blacks individuals are expected to absorb the burden of loss. This dynamic is made clear in the introduction in which she outlines the animating question of this work: “how is loss mobilized politically?” (4). She goes on to introduce readers to the idea of “loss,” which is not just about grief, harm, or injustice. For Hooker, loss is a defining feature of our political system, yet all loss is not attended to in the same way. Most importantly, all people are not expected to endure loss in the same way.

Chapter 1 delves into how white experience loss. Much of the loss they decry are anticipatory losses that “may be experienced as a harm without having yet occurred, and it can also be inaccurate” (33). Yet, these unrealized fears on the parts of whites have real consequences for our democracy. The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 seems to confirm one of the animating ideas of Hooker's book that “some white citizens seem willing to dispense with democracy in o