Grief, truth telling, prophetic imagination, and social change

I recently watched the movie Till with my family. It recounts the tragic death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Two men were charged with murder but acquitted at their trial. Later the two men confessed to the killing in a paid interview for a magazine article.

Most of the movie is about the grief of Till's mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, and how this drives her to activism with the NAACP and energises the campaign for civil rights. A key event is Mamie's courageous decision to view the tortured and battered corpse of her son, and then to demand a funeral with an open casket, so others can see what happened to him.

By coincidence, I am currently reading The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. Its themes and ideas resonate with the movie.

“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” - page 3

The consciousness of the southern USA [and Australia] in the 1950s was that non-whites had no civil or voting rights and that they should accept the system as it was. Nothing was going to change. Entrenched powers created, maintained, and enforced this social reality and consciousness. This consciousness can be identified with what Brueggemann calls the "royal consciousness", that was created, maintained, and enforced by kings of Israel, beginning with Solomon. 

In the 40th Anniversary edition, Brueggemann reflects.

 “I would now alter ‘royal consciousness’ to ‘totalism’...The term ‘totalism’ refers to a socio-ideological arrangement in which hegemonic ideology takes up all the social space and allows for no alternative possibility. Its claim is ‘total’!” 

A key dimension to this "totalism" is that it leads to a numbness about death.

"What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death." (page 41)

Mamie did this.