One Saturday in November 2017, just days after Thanksgiving, Maxayn Gooden received one of the worst phone calls imaginable. The Harrisburg Police Department called to confirm that her son, JahSun Patton, had been shot to death. Patton, 18, was a Philadelphia high school senior with a promising future. He was looking forward to attending college and playing collegiate football. Patton was known for always smiling and his willingness to lend a helping hand. But he was a little down because of an injury that prohibited him from playing on his high school team and participating in other activities.
Because Patton and his older half-sister were close, Gooden let him spend Thanksgiving break with her in Harrisburg, thinking it would lift his spirits. The visit took a turn for the worse. A guest in his sister’s home shot him seven times. Instead of Gooden reuniting with her son at the 30th Street Station, the next time she would see him would be in a casket.
Since Patton’s death, Gooden has been advocating for gun violence prevention, mentoring young boys, and working part-time at the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting. She’s even opened her home to Patton’s friends to give them a safe space to grieve.
“These young men need an outlet. They need safe spaces, because they just don’t have it,” said Gooden. “It’s very important to let youth, primarily Black and brown, young boys, know that there are resources that can help them through tough times.”
Before he was shot, Patton was a part of a group of “brothers” — friends who leaned on each other and were already being interviewed about loss by a researcher named Nora Gross. Each of them had lost a peer or friend to gun violence. During two years of Gross’s ethnographic research in an all-boys, all-Black Philadelphia high school, three students, including Patton, died in separate instances of community gun violence. Her research primarily focused on the ways in which the grief that stems from gun violence affects Black adolescent boys’ school engagement, relationships with peers and teachers, and ideas about their own futures — as well as the consequences of the neglect of Black boys’ emotional lives.
The results of Gross’s Philadelphia research were published in her recent book, “Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools.” It describes her interactions with students, the short time she had to get to know Patton, and how Patton’ s friends mourned his loss. “Brothers in Grief” also pinpoints disparities within support systems for Black boys, emphasizing the need for schools to address grief. Gross writes about the prominent role social media plays in expressing grief, and how it contrasts with the lack of in-person discussion.
In an interview with The Trace, Gross discusses her research and writing process, her most striking observations, and gives a few suggestions on how schools can help students grieve and understand the relationship between their own losses and the structural forces that shape their neighborhoods.
These answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
AT: Please tell us a bit about what you are doing now professionally and what inspired you to write this book?
NG: I’m an assistant professor of education at Barnard College, part of Columbia University. The book came about after seven years that I spent living in Philly during grad school, where I was working on a Ph.D. in sociology and education. The idea and the questions that I had about grief, for instance, what role grief might play in young people’s lives and in their school lives. Those questions have been with me since I was 22 and a first-time high school teacher in Chicago.
Though gun violence was a concern in Chicago, It wasn’t the experience of losses that we faced as a school community. When I got to Philadelphia as a graduate student in 2013, I became much more aware of the prevalence and the magnitude of youth gun violence, and really started to wonder, what role does loss and grief play in a young person’s life, given the number of school-aged youth that were killed every year. I was lucky to get connected to a particular school in Philadelphia and be welcomed in, to start to think through those questions and meet these boys and learn about their lives.
AT: Was there anything that you found shocking or surprising during your research?
The most surprising thing that I learned was the importance of social media. I found a disconnect between the way that they talked and shared with each other about grief in person, and then the amount of space they gave to their grief online. Their Instagrams were full of really expressive, vulnerable posts about losing friends, missing their friends, and reflecting on their own mortality and their ideas about their own risks and dangers.
They just posted all the time, thoughts and musings and worries and fears. In person with each other, they didn’t share much. They weren’t given that much space to talk about those kinds of things in school. My research shows that at least for Black boys, it may be that there’s a safe and necessary space online for emotional vulnerability that they don’t have elsewhere.
AT: What type of disparities do Black boys face?
I can mostly speak about that one school, and not comparatively, but anecdotally, and by reading other people’s research, it’s definitely clear that school resources make a difference. There are other schools that have way more resources that serve white kids, middle class, or upper middle class kids, that make more space and time for grief and appreciate the long term, winding, unpredictable nature of grief in terms of being able to offer services and supports that really last.
In a place like Philadelphia, that’s considered the poorest major city in the country, schools have failed and underserved Black boys. The schools that serve Black boys are playing catch up. For a school that’s trying to get low-income Black boys through high school and on to college, they feel this urgency. They have no time to waste because these kids have been underserved by their schools for years, and there isn’t time for them to sit and grieve, or process, or heal, because we have these exams and we have these college preparation programs, we have to make up for the years in school that they’re behind.
The disparities are both very concrete resource disparities, and then also this understandable sense of emergency.There’s also the underlying stereotypes that Black boys don’t feel as much, or that they’re somehow able to handle pain or are more resilient than other kids. That’s one thing I think my research shows, is, they’re resilient, but also, they feel a lot and they’re in a lot of pain. Neglecting it is not really the answer.
AT: Can adequate and accessible grief counseling help mitigate youth gun violence among Black boys?
The participants in my study, a small subset of the young Black men and boys in Philadelphia, weren’t committing violence. They weren’t seeking revenge for their losses. They were definitely harmed by not having their grief recognized and supported. I wouldn’t say that, for them, that produced more gun violence in the city, but I do know that it is the story of other people.
That adage, hurt people, hurt people, is true. Just because I happened to spend a lot of time with a group of boys who were essentially nonviolent doesn’t mean that their hurt and the lack of support received wasn’t potentially contributing to the sort of larger issues in the city.
AT: What do you want people to take away from this book?
I want readers to really feel the experiences of these boys and whether they relate to them, or, whether the readers are similarly situated, or from completely different walks of life. I hope that the book helps readers feel that Black boys’ grief is real. It’s long term, and the way that institutions respond to their grief matters.
The Trace’s reporting in Philadelphia is a part of the Every Voice, Every Vote project and supported as well by the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the Neubauer Family Foundation, and the William Penn Foundation. You can read more about The Trace’s Philadelphia supporters here, and read our editorial independence policy here.
