When Death Becomes a Weapon: Racism, Power, and the Politics of Who Is Allowed to Live and Be Remembered

Death is often described as the great equalizer. Regardless of wealth, status, nationality, or race, every human life eventually ends. Yet history demonstrates that death has never been experienced equally. Racism has influenced who is exposed to premature death, whose death is treated as acceptable, whose grief receives public sympathy, and whose remains are allowed to rest with dignity.

To say that death has been weaponized through racism does not mean that every racial difference in mortality is the result of an individual consciously deciding to harm someone. Sometimes death has been used deliberately as an instrument of terror. In other cases, discriminatory laws, institutions, medical practices, economic conditions, and social attitudes have created environments in which certain communities are repeatedly placed closer to death.

Understanding this history requires looking beyond individual acts of prejudice. It requires examining how death (and the threat, visibility, administration, and memory of death) has been used to maintain racial power.

Lynching and Death as Public Terror

One of the clearest examples of weaponized death in the United States is racial terror lynching. Lynching was not simply an act of murder committed against an individual. It was a public message directed toward an entire community.

Following the abolition of slavery, white mobs used lynching to enforce racial segregation, suppress Black political participation, punish economic success, and discourage challenges to white authority. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings of Black people in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. These killings were often tolerated—or actively supported—by local officials and members of the broader community.

Many lynchings were conducted publicly before large crowds. Victims were tortured, burned, shot, mutilated, or hanged. Photographs were sometimes taken, distributed, and even turned into postcards. The purpose was not only to end one person’s life. The spectacle communicated that Black people could be killed without legal protection and that those who challenged racial boundaries might face the same fate.

Death therefore became a form of social control. The person who was killed was the immediate victim, but the fear created by the killing extended through families, neighborhoods, and generations. Racial terror contributed to the displacement of Black families and helped drive migration away from communities where violence was routinely used to enforce white supremacy.

Indigenous Death and Forced Assimilation

Death was also embedded within the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples. For more than a century, American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children were removed from their families and sent to government-operated or government-supported boarding schools.

These institutions were designed to separate children from their languages, spiritual traditions, families, and tribal identities. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s investigation, at least 973 Indigenous children died while attending federal boarding schools. The investigation identified at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites connected to 65 school locations, while acknowledging that the complete number of deaths may never be known.

For many families, children disappeared into these institutions and never returned. Death was compounded by separation: parents were sometimes denied the opportunity to bring their children home, conduct traditional ceremonies, or bury them within their communities.

This represents more than institutional neglect. The boarding-school system was part of a broader policy of cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession. By separating children from their nations and suppressing Indigenous identity, the government sought to weaken the transmission of culture across generations. The deaths and distant burials of children became part of that process of disruption.

When families are denied access to a body, a burial place, a ceremony, or even accurate information about what happened, death becomes another means of exercising control.

The Racial Administration of State-Sanctioned Death

The criminal legal system provides another example of how death can be distributed through racial power. Capital punishment is theoretically reserved for the most serious crimes, but research has repeatedly shown that its application is influenced by race—particularly the race of the victim.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office review of 28 studies found a consistent pattern of racial disparities in capital sentencing. In 82 percent of the studies, the race of the victim affected whether a defendant was charged with a capital crime or received a death sentence. Cases involving white victims were more likely to result in capital punishment than comparable cases involving Black victims.

This disparity communicates something disturbing about the social value assigned to different lives. When the killing of a white person is more likely to produce the harshest possible punishment than the killing of a Black person, the system implicitly creates a hierarchy of victims.

The National Academies has similarly concluded that measurable racial disparities appear throughout the criminal justice system, including arrests, detention, sentencing, incarceration, and the application of the death penalty. These differences cannot always be reduced to a single prejudiced official. They emerge through discretionary decisions made by police officers, prosecutors, judges, juries, legislators, and institutions operating within a society already shaped by racial inequality.

Police Violence and the Threat of Premature Death

The relationship between race and state power also appears in deaths involving law enforcement. A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Black men faced approximately a one-in-1,000 lifetime risk of being killed by police under the mortality conditions examined by the researchers. The study described police violence as a significant cause of death for young men, particularly young men of color.

Another major study, published in The Lancet, estimated that approximately 30,800 people died from police violence in the United States between 1980 and 2018—about 17,100 more deaths than were recorded in the federal vital-statistics system. Researchers found both significant underreporting and substantial racial disparities in fatal police violence.

These deaths affect more than the individuals directly involved. Highly publicized killings can produce collective fear, grief, anger, and trauma. Families may be required to mourn while simultaneously defending the humanity of their loved one in public. Images of the death may circulate repeatedly through television and social media, transforming a private loss into a public spectacle.

This creates a painful contradiction. Recording and sharing evidence of violence can be necessary for accountability, yet the repeated display of Black death can also reproduce the historical spectacle of racial violence. The deceased person risks becoming known primarily through the final moments of their life rather than through their relationships, personality, work, dreams, and humanity.

Structural Racism and “Slow Death”

Death does not have to be visibly violent to be connected to racism. It can also result from what is sometimes described as structural or slow violence: the cumulative effects of unequal access to health care, safe housing, nutritious food, clean environments, stable employment, education, and protection from chronic stress.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified structural and interpersonal racism as fundamental causes of health inequities. Racism can limit access to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and other resources necessary for maintaining health. These conditions contribute to persistent racial differences in illness, disability, life expectancy, and premature mortality.

This form of weaponized death may be less visible than a lynching or police killing, but it can be equally consequential. A community exposed to polluted air, dangerous employment, medical undertreatment, inadequate transportation, food insecurity, and chronic economic stress will predictably experience poorer health outcomes.

These deaths are often described as unfortunate disparities rather than preventable consequences of policy. That language can conceal responsibility. When a society repeatedly produces conditions in which one population is more likely to become sick and die prematurely, the pattern cannot be understood only through individual behavior or biological difference.

Race is not a biological cause of mortality. Racism creates the unequal conditions in which people live, receive care, experience stress, and encounter institutions.

Racism Does Not Always End at Death

Racial hierarchy has also shaped what happens to people after they die. Throughout American history, Black families were excluded from many white cemeteries and churchyards. In colonial New York, enslaved and free Africans were restricted from Christian burial grounds and created their own cemetery outside the city’s boundaries. That burial ground was later covered by urban development and largely forgotten until construction workers rediscovered it in 1991.

Across the country, many historic Black cemeteries have been abandoned, disturbed, paved over, damaged by construction, or denied the preservation resources provided to other historic sites. Cemeteries created because of segregation have therefore faced a second injustice through neglect and erasure.

Burial is not merely the disposal of human remains. A grave records that a person existed, belonged to a community, and was considered worthy of remembrance. Destroying or neglecting burial grounds can erase family histories and remove physical evidence of communities that racism attempted to marginalize.

The treatment of the dead reveals the values of the living. When some graves are protected while others are forgotten, the inequality that existed during life continues after death.

Resisting the Weaponization of Death

Communities have long resisted racialized death by reclaiming names, bodies, ceremonies, burial grounds, and historical memory. Anti-lynching activists documented killings that authorities attempted to dismiss. Indigenous communities continue working to identify boarding-school burial sites and return children to their nations. Families affected by police violence insist that the public say their loved ones’ names. Descendant communities preserve neglected cemeteries and demand respectful treatment of ancestral remains.

Memorialization can therefore become an act of resistance. It transforms people from anonymous victims into individuals with histories, families, and dignity. The creation of the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York, for example, followed years of community activism demanding that the site and the people buried there be treated as sacred rather than merely archaeological.

Death-care professionals also have a role in this work. Funeral directors, cemetery workers, hospice providers, medical personnel, grief counselors, clergy, historians, and public officials must recognize how racial inequality affects access to care, funeral options, cultural rituals, grief support, and memorialization.

Ethical death care requires more than treating every family politely. It requires examining whether policies, prices, locations, professional practices, and institutional traditions create unequal burdens. It also means listening to communities whose mourning customs and relationships with the dead have historically been misunderstood, restricted, or erased.

Death Is Universal. Dignity Has Not Been.

Death may be biologically universal, but the circumstances surrounding it are shaped by power. Racism has used death as punishment, terror, forced assimilation, social control, institutional abandonment, and historical erasure.

Recognizing this history does not mean that racial progress is impossible. It means that equality must include more than the right to live without explicit discrimination. It must include protection from preventable death, equal value within legal and medical systems, freedom to mourn according to one’s culture, respectful treatment of human remains, and the preservation of every community’s dead.

A just society is not measured only by how it treats people while they are alive. It is also measured by whose lives it protects, whose deaths it investigates, whose grief it honors, and whose names it refuses to forget.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Impact of racism on our nation’s health.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025). How racism leads to cancer health disparities.

Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(34), 16793–16798.

Equal Justice Initiative. (n.d.). Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror.

GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators. (2021). Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: A network meta-regression. The Lancet, 398(10307), 1239–1255.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2023). Reducing racial inequality in crime and justice: Science, practice, and policy. The National Academies Press.

National Park Service. (n.d.). African Burial Ground National Monument: History and culture.

U.S. Department of the Interior. (2024). Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report: Volume II.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (1990). Death penalty sentencing: Research indicates pattern of racial disparities (GAO/GGD-90-57).