What Now?: The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference

In her hit song Rihanna belts out, And I just wanna scream, What Now? I just can't figure it out." She announces the oncoming scream that expresses frustration and anguish; lamenting her precarity. Many diasporic black women similarly scream in this "post" moment and throughout history as we navigate a precarious relationship with the state and society. I pursue the anguish-filled question of "what now" via the trope I call the wailing black woman to analyze the representational trajectory of black mothers mourning publically to bring attention to injustices and black women's public grief in reality television show The First 48. This article responds to sociologist Herman Gray's call for critical scholars to consider the affective labor of media images, or what he describes as the "gatherings of sentiment, feelings, and intensities around media images and coverage of people of color"' Thus, I ask: 1) How does the deployment of wailing black women relate to hegemonic narratives of black death, criminality, and citizenship? and 2) What are potential interventions of her affective labor? I consider the affective labor of black women's presence both as a cautionary tale on The First 48 and as a potential oppositional figure on the show and in other spheres.