#LongLiveDaGuys: Online Grief, Solidarity, and Emotional Freedom for Black Teenage Boys after the Gun Deaths of Friends

Abstract

This ethnographic study follows a group of Black teenage boys in their Philadelphia high school and online in the years following the shooting death of their friend. Within their peer group, the boys generally focus their shared memorializations on upbeat and affirming reminiscences, protecting each other from sadness but constraining their own emotional displays. In contrast, in the boys’ private worlds, most spend years actively working through their grief in material and embodied ways, including through objects they keep or wear. On social media, these private and public worlds converge as the boys regularly share their private grief expressions with public audiences and define their digital identities by loss. Contrary to popular worries about adolescent social media use, this research finds that for grieving Black boys online worlds offer unusual space for emotional freedom, social support, and solidarity around loss and a counter to restrictive racialized and gendered feeling rules.