ABSTRACT

In her discussion of racial representations in the American media, titled Postmortems: Facing the Black Male Corpse, Deborah McDowell (1995) took as her text the pictures of young black male corpses and mourning mothers that have become an increasingly common feature in daily newspapers. Publishing the black male corpse, McDowell suggests, protects the privacy of white death and its mourners. The publicity given to maternal mourning obscures both the factual presence of mourning black fathers and the physical existence of other unphotographed white corpses.