In 2015, Danish-Palestinian Omar El-Hussein shot and killed two
men in Copenhagen, before being killed himself by the police.
Danish media immediately classified El-Hussein’s actions as ‘a
terrorist attack’, and they became the object of extreme concern
to the Danish public. In the following days, the two murder sites
were momentarily turned into public memorial spaces. When the
site of the killing of El-Hussein also became a site of mourning,
however, it prompted a negative reaction from politicians and the
white majority public. While the mixed reactions to publicly
mourning a murderer are understandable, they also reveal something
about the racialized conditions of public mourning. Reading
the different acts of publicly mourning El-Hussein, the article
investigates the ways in which public sites of grief are outlined
by racialized economies. This article builds upon Butler’s argument
that public mourning forms as indicative of which lives are considered
lives at all. However, we argue that such an analysis must
consider the racialized logics of the performativity of public
mourning: Thus, while non-white grief seems not to be recognized
as grief at all, white grief tends to reiterate the racialized processes
that outline white lives as grievable at the expense of non-white
lives.