Abstract
The August 2020 death of Black actor Chadwick Boseman, at age 43 from colon cancer was a notable public event. Given Boseman’s popularity, particularly amongst Black audiences, and racial disparities in colorectal cancer rates, public responses to this news provided a window into potential racial differences in expressing and responding to parasocial grief, that is, grief at the loss of a public figure. Additionally, given how the movies he starred in were easily viewable by audiences stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and given his popularity on digital spaces like Black Twitter, this case offers insights into how media use can help people cope with parasocial grief. We conducted a mixed-methods survey study of audience responses Boseman’s death. Quantitative results reveal that Black audiences had different rates of social sharing and movie viewing than non-Black audiences, with additional insights emerging from a thematic analysis of the open-ended data.
The August 2020 death of Black actor Chadwick Boseman, at only 43 years old, from colon cancer was a notable public event in the United States and beyond. Boseman, who portrayed the character T’Challa in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, alongside other prominent movie roles, was the first Black actor to headline a superhero movie (Ugwu & Levenson, 2020). News of Boseman’s death was posted on his Twitter account the evening of Friday, August 28, 2020, and the post quickly became Twitter’s most liked tweet of all time with more than 5.8 million likes (Sandler, 2020). Social media users around the country expressed intense sadness and shock as well as of love for Boseman, someone most had never met in person but knew through his media products, social media posts, and news coverage of him and his work (Akhther & Tetteh, 2021; Bingaman, 2020).
The specific context of Boseman’s death also matters. Following the announcement of Boseman’s death, Naik et al. (2021) found an increase in Internet activity related to colon cancer for the next 2 weeks, particularly in geographic areas of the United States that had a higher proportion of Black residents. The researchers looked at Google Trends data and the Wikipedia page for colorectal cancer, noting an increase in relative search volume by nearly 600% for colorectal cancer and 700% for colon cancer screening. Increases in searches continued for 4 months. Additionally, Sajjadi et al. (2021) found an increase in relative search volume for colorectal cancer in their analysis looking at Google Trends, also finding an increase in colorectal cancer Web site traffic at the American Cancer Society Web site. This uptick in cancer-related information seeking matter because colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer, excluding skin cancers, diagnosed in men and women in the U.S. (American Cancer Society, 2022) and disproportionally affects the Black community (American Cancer Society, 2020). Black Americans, in comparison to other racial/ethnic groups, are approximately 20% more likely to get colorectal cancer and 40% more likely to die from it (American Cancer Society, 2020).
Questions remain, though, about why and for whom learning the news of Boseman’s death translated into subsequent communication—about his cause of death but also for processing the emotions related to the passing of a prominent Black actor. First, while audience responses to news of celebrity deaths have previously been studied, it is less clear how the race of the audience members and of the celebrity may influence our responses to celebrity deaths. Given that Boseman was Black and news of his death was first announced via social media, research on communities like Black Twitter is apt in this context. Second, the role of media use as a coping tool for grieving a lost parasocial relationship (e.g., a perceived relationship with a public figure) is understudied and particularly relevant in this context since Boseman was an actor and people could readily re-watch his movies. Third, a mixed methods approach to investigating audience responses to news of Boseman’s death can provide researchers with both interesting statistical associations and nuanced explanations for why they might exist. As such, this present study offers both a quantitative and qualitative investigation of audience responses, including media use, to learning of Chadwick Boseman’s death from colon cancer.
Literature Review
Research suggests that—via media coverage—audience members can easily become psychologically involved with celebrities (Brown, 2015). This process is known, broadly, as audience involvement, an umbrella term describing the various ways audiences form psychological connections with mediated personae (Brown, 2015; Noar et al., 2014). Types of audience involvement include identification, which is an overlap between one’s identity and that of the mediated persona, and parasocial relationship, or imagining the mediated persona to be like a real-life friend (Brown, 2015).
Importantly, audience involvement has been shown to motivate people to change health-related behaviors after learning about a celebrity illness or death (Brown & Basil, 1995). Theoretically, this connection between audience involvement and post-disclosure behavior change can be tied to social cognitive theory, which argues that identifying with a role model increases the likelihood of mimicking that person’s observed behavior identifying with a role model (Bandura, 1986; 2004). Research shows that identification with a celebrity can motivate audiences to take health-related actions (Basil, 1996; Brown & Basil, 2010). Additionally, parasocial relationships with celebrities can also encourage health-related information seeking and interpersonal sharing about health topics (Cohen & Hoffner, 2016).
Recent theorizing has attempted to examine the chain of effects that occur when news spreads about a celebrity death. The Celerity Illness Disclosure Effects (CIDE) model argues that audience involvement with a celebrity (e.g., identification, parasocial relationships) predict stronger emotional responses to learning about their illness or death, which in turn predicts how people feel, think, and communicate about the health condition itself (Myrick & Willoughby, 2021). The effects of emotional responses to the news depend largely on the nature of the emotion and beliefs about the health condition. Sadness, a common reaction to death, occurs when an individual experiences an irrevocable loss and often leads people to be introspective and sedentary (Lazarus, 1991). Sadness is also associated with increased risk aversion (Campos-Vazquez & Cuilty, 2014), which could motivate individuals to pay more attention to information related to avoiding the cause of the celebrity’s illness and eventual death. Furthermore, the process of taking action to prevent the disease that caused the death of their parasocial friend could be seen as a way of honoring his life and also actively coping with grief.
Examining Racial Differences
While the CIDE model is helpful for examining the processes that shape audience responses to news of a celebrity death, factors that may moderate these responses have been largely unexplored. As noted by Francis and Zelaya (2020), sociocultural constructs have been largely ignored in studies of the effects of celebrity death news. These researchers found higher rates of information seeking about cancer after singer Aretha Franklin’s death from the disease in a survey sample of Black women than did previous research on information seeking about pancreatic cancer in responses to Steve Jobs’ death from the disease using a dominantly white sample. It could be that for members of less privileged groups in society, seeing someone they relate to die from cancer is a stronger spark than for members of privileged communities or for people who do not strongly relate to the celebrity.
As noted above, colon cancer disproportionately affects Black Americans. As such, it is important for this particular context to assess how news of Boseman’s death from the disease may have differentially affected Black versus non-Black audiences. As the star of the popular Marvel movie Black Panther, research suggests that Boseman helped increase perceptions of African American vitality (Sanders & Banjo, 2021). Boseman also portrayed important Black figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson, making his body of work particularly relevant for thinking about the role of race in American society. With his popularity and the influence of his work, the case of Boseman’s death from colon cancer is an important one to investigate for potential differential impacts on Black versus non-Black audiences.
Black Social Media
The immediacy of social media as an outlet for sharing both news and feelings made it an important communicative context for examining potential racial differences in response to news of Boseman’s death. Extant literature indicates that social media, particularly “Black Twitter,” a subset of Twitter users in the United States who engage in culturally specific communication practices on the social networking platform, offers a rich site for the exploration of phenomena specific to or reflective of the lived experiences of Black Americans (Brock, 2020; Florini, 2013).
Structurally speaking, Black Twitter consists of a series of temporally limited yet culturally linked networks of users across three levels of connection: personal communities, thematic nodes (or neighborhoods), and a meta-network that emerges as the earlier two converge around a topic of common interest (Clark, 2015). By tweeting in concert about matters of concern to Black communities, these users create trending topics that allow the networks to figure as an influential counter-public, bringing greater attention to culturally specific coping mechanisms in reaction to racial violence (Clark et al., 2017), sexual exploitation of Black women and girls (Jackson et al., 2020), intimate partner violence (Clark, 2016), and mental health crises (Francis, 2021), to name a few examples.
Early evidence of Black Twitter’s parasocial connection to Boseman emerged in 2016 with the hashtag #BlackPantherSoLit, a response to casting announcements about the 2018 feature film. Black Panther’s release was received as “must-see Blackness” among its Black fans, many of whom dressed up their children and/or wore replicas of T’Challa’s action suit themselves to screen the film. Martin (2019) ascribes a sense of pedagogical utility to entertainment properties like Black Panther, noting that Black parents and other-mothers found it important for Black children to see themselves represented as superheroes, figures that are gifted with extraordinary physical health and strength.
In April of 2020, Fans reacted in shock when a gaunt Boseman posted an Instagram video promoting “Operation 42,” an initiative that distributed personal protective equipment to Black communities that were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Comments on Boseman’s Instagram page and on Twitter, where the video was shared by other users, ranged from concern to mockery as many speculated about the cause of his dramatic weight loss. Additionally, Black Twitter’s long-established pattern of engaging in social viewing (Chatman, 2017) of celebrity funerals (for instance, Michael Jackson’s in 2009 and Nispey Hu$$le’s a decade later), suggests that these users take to the platform as a means of collective sense-making and mourning when prominent Black figures face illness and death.
Parasocial Grieving and Media Use as A Coping Tool
The popularity of social media allow for responses to death, particularly those of public figures, to be visibly shared (Akhther & Tetteh, 2021). Parasocial grief, or feeling heartbroken and depressed over a loss, can be experienced when mediated personae with whom people had a parasocial relationship have died (Cohen & Hoffner, 2016). For instance, Cohen and Hoffner (2016) found that grief experienced after learning of actor Robin William’s death drove individuals to share information about the actor’s health struggles on social media sites, particularly if those individuals had engaged in positive meaning making processes (i.e., they reappraised the tragic loss of a beloved celebrity into an event that could have a “silver lining”).
Social media, in particular, offer a forum for people to cope with their grief by expressing their emotions, reading about others’ feelings, and sharing messages with others (Akhther & Tetteh, 2021; Sanderson & Hope Cheong, 2010). Emotions associated with parasocial grief over a celebrity death include shock and sadness initially, and eventually love and admiration for the celebrity after reflection has occurred (Bingaman, 2020). The affordance of interactivity and the ability of fans to find each other on social media and coordinate their discussions or tributes to a fallen celebrity can allow people to process their grief-related emotions together, communally (Sanderson & Hope Cheong, 2010).
In addition to using social media to find community and express emotions, more traditional media use may also be integrated into the parasocial grieving process for many fans. Research indicates that people regularly turn to media, be it music, television, or books, to help them cope with stress (Nabi et al., 2017), and that digital media messages can aid with coping during stressful times (Myrick et al., 2021). Individuals could likewise benefit from turning to multiple types of media to cope with the grief brought on by news of a celebrity death. When that celebrity is an actor, re-watching his movies may be a prominent activity that members of the public undertake.
Research Questions
Together, the above literature leads us to ask the following research questions: RQ1: What thoughts and feelings went through participants’ minds after they first heard the news? RQ2a: Will race of participant (Black vs. non-Black) be related to likelihood of posting on social media after Boseman’s death? RQ2b: For those who posted on social media after Boseman’s death, what did they share? RQ3a: Will race of participant (Black vs. non-Black) be related to re-watching his movies after his death? RQ3b: For those who did re-watch movies, how will they report the experience as affecting them? RQ4a: Which variables (knowing someone else with colon cancer, Black race, audience involvement, attention paid to news of Boseman’s death, sadness after learning the news) will predict increased intentions to get screened for colon cancer? RQ4b: Which variables (knowing someone else with colon cancer, Black race, audience involvement, attention paid to news of Boseman’s death, sadness after learning the news) will predict increased intentions to talk to other people about colon cancer?
Method
To address the above research questions, we conducted a convergent mixed methods study using a cross-sectional survey with a convenience sample of participants recruited from social media.
Participants
While 173 individuals began the survey, the 156 participants who had heard about Boseman’s death are the focus of our analyses. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 57 years old (M = 34.9, SD = 9.05). More than half of the sample identified as a woman (62.2%, n = 97), and 22.4% (n = 35) identified as a man, 1 participant preferred not to answer and 2 identified as a gender not listed. About half of the participants identified as White (52.6%), a little more than a quarter identified as Black (26.9%), 7.1% identified as Asian, 0.6% identified as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 3.8% identified as “other” (participants could chose more than one racial category). Additionally, 4.5% of the sample identified as Hispanic or Latino/a. More than a third of the sample had a graduate degree (44.5%), 21.9% had a Bachelor’s degree, 8.7% had a technical degree, and 2.9% had a high school degree or GED. Twenty-two percent of respondents did not report education. Participants lived in 32 different states, with the largest proportion from Virginia (10%), Pennsylvania (8.1%), California (8.1%), and Texas (5.8%). Nobody in the sample reported having a personal diagnosis of colon cancer while 34 stated they had a family member or close personal friend who had a diagnosis.
Procedure
The survey link was distributed within 72 hours of the announcement on social media of Boseman’s death (August 28, 2020). We had approval prior to his death from a university institutional review board to conduct exempt survey research about public responses to celebrity illnesses and deaths. Our survey was posted to social media on Monday, August 31, with a link distributed via Twitter and Reddit. The survey was available for approximately a month, and researchers used a snowball sampling technique by reaching out to a small sample of individuals who had tweeted about Boseman’s death on social media to further share the survey invitation through their networks.
After providing consent to participate, the survey showed respondents a photo of Boseman. Respondents then responded to items assessing identification and parasocial interaction before being asked if, prior to the survey, they had heard of Boseman’s passing. Of the individuals who made it to that part of the questionnaire (N = 157), 156 (99.4%) reported that yes, they had heard of Boseman’s death. Of those 156, 155 (99.4%) correctly identified Boseman’s cause of death as colon cancer (from seven options: COVID-19, sickle cell anemia, lung cancer, skin cancer, colon cancer, influenza, or car accident). All respondents were then told/reminded that Boseman died on August 28 from colon cancer. The 156 individuals who had heard of his death were the one’s retained for analyses. They were subsequently asked about their responses to the news of Boseman’s death, their intentions, and finally demographic questions. Respondents who completed the study also had the option at the end to provide contact information (in a separate questionnaire) to be entered into a drawing for one of four $50 gift cards and/or to receive information on the results of the study.
Measures
Audience Involvement with Boseman
To assess parasocial relationship and identification with Boseman, five items for each concept were adapted from the Bocarnea and Brown (2007) scales for these concepts. Example items for parasocial relationship included “Chadwick Boseman made me feel as if I were with someone I knew well” and “when Chadwick Boseman appeared in the media, I tried to pay attention to him.” Example items for identification included “I could easily relate to Chadwick Boseman” and “I could identify with Chadwick Boseman.” All items were measured in the same matrix on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly disagree). A Principal Component Analysis with Promax rotation revealed that all 10 items loaded onto a single factor, which we labeled “audience involvement,” that explained 58.26% of the variance (α = .92, M = 4.84, SD = 1.20).
Attention Paid to Death News
On a scale from 1 (none at all) to 7 (a lot), participants were asked: “How much attention did you pay to stories in the media (in any form, print, television, or online) or on social media about Chadwick Boseman since Friday, August 28?” (M = 5.81, SD = 1.24).
Responses to First Learning the News
We provided an open-ended textbox after asking the following “Please take a few minutes to write about what went through your head when you first heard of Chadwick Boseman’s death.”
Sadness Response
After viewing the stem “When you first heard about Chadwick Boseman’s death, how did you feel? Please rate how much of each of the following emotions you felt,” and mixed between filler items (e.g., “startled,” “shocked”) that were used to mask the purpose of this question (since people sometimes are reticent to report grief-related feelings) were three items assessing sadness on a scale of 1 (none of this emotion) to 7 (a great deal of this emotion): sad, depressed, and disheartened (α = .74, M = 5.21, SD = 1.33).
Posted Anything on Social Media
Respondents were asked: “After learning about Chadwick Boseman’s death, did you post about him or his death or comment on another post about him or his death on social media using any of the following platforms?” with five response options (participants could choose all that applied): Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or another social media platform (with the option to list which one). Thirty-one (19.9%) of participants shared something on Facebook, 41.7% shared something on Twitter, 17.9% shared something on Instagram, nobody in our sample shared anything on Reddit, and 1.9% of the sample reported sharing something on another social media platform (e.g., TikTok, SnapChat, LinkedIn, etc.). For analyses, a composite variable was created where individuals were coded as 0 if they did not share any of the platforms (including the “other” category) and 1 if they shared on any of them. This recoding revealed that about half (48.7%) of participants shared something on at least one social media platform after Boseman’s death.
What Was Shared
We provided an open-ended textbox (only to those who replied that they had shared something) after asking the following: “Please describe in as much detail as you can recall what you posted or commented about Chadwick Boseman or his death and how people in your social networks responded to your post(s) about him.”
Watched Movies
Participants were asked “After you learned of Chadwick Boseman’s death, did you watch any of his movies?” with 151 participants responding: yes (n = 67, 38.7%) or no (n = 84, 48.6%). For those who answered yes, they were presented with the following open-ended prompt: “Please tell us more about which movie or movies you watched, why you chose to watch his movies after his death, and how watching those movies after his death affected you (if at all)?”
Screening Intentions
Colorectal cancer screening intentions were measured with two items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree): “If I experienced symptoms of gastrointestinal distress (e.g., abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, anal bleeding), I would contact a healthcare provider” and “If I met the criteria for colorectal cancer screening (adults age 50 to 75 be screened), I would schedule a screening with a healthcare professional” (r = .35, p < .001, M = 5.62, SD = 1.30).
Interpersonal Sharing Intentions
Two items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) were used to assess intentions to talk to other people about colon cancer: “I intend to talk to my loved ones about colon cancer screening; ” and “I am planning to talk to family members and/or friends about colon cancer” (r = .89, p < .001).
Results
The first research question (RQ1a) asked what thoughts and feelings went through participants’ minds after they first heard the news of Boseman’s death. To address that question, two of the researchers used the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). They first independently reviewed the open-ended responses, which were isolated from any demographic data, to identify themes from the full data set. They then discussed the themes they found together, identifying multiple themes in response to the different prompts.
A primary theme that emerged was how many participants experienced an emotional response to hearing about Boseman’s death. Within the broader theme of emotions, we noted discrete emotions that were experienced, including shock, disbelief and sadness, in line with previous work in this area (Bingaman, 2020). As one participant noted: “Absolute shock and sadness for not only him and his family, but what a loss it is to the Black community.”
Related to their disbelief, some participants expressed that they felt the information must be a hoax or “fake news.” Others took a while to process the information and what it meant to them, noting a combination of powerful emotions. As one participant noted: I was scrolling through my twitter feed, and it showed up in real time at the top. I really, truly felt like I had been punched in the gut. It was very surreal, reading the statement and learning that it was cancer. I had a brief moment of very strong denial- first that it couldn't be the same Chadwick Boseman, and then second that it was some kind of mistake. When the news finally settled in, I couldn't stop scrolling and seeing people’s reactions in real time. People were DMing me the tweet and messaging me. I was on my phone and heavily wept for the rest of the night.
Another theme related to how participants felt connected to Boseman. Subthemes included perceptions of him as a role model as well as focusing on his acting skills. As one participant noted: I think the first words I thought were “oh no.” I knew how important Black Panther was to the Black community, and that he was an excellent actor who did an awesome job of portraying the role. I was saddened for the loss of his art and his voice that the world was now experiencing.
Participants, like the one above, often mentioned the importance of Boseman to the larger Black community, particularly during the year of 2020 that included many other stressors, such as the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. One participant said: “He was so young. A Black hero/icon was gone. Another devastating blow to the African American community during 2020.” Another participant specifically expressed that “with everything happening this year, it felt like a punch to the body.” Another stated: “Honestly, I thought maybe all the good people are going to a better place and we are stuck in some sort of purgatory. I know this is an irrational thought, but it is the only way I could rationalize the unfairness of it all.”
Participants also talked about the loss in relation to their own lives. Some referenced family members who experienced similar illnesses, others talked about the impact this would have on their family members. One participant said: “I immediately felt crushed for my nephews, who idolized his character, and reflected on how much I enjoyed his work. It felt like a huge blow.” Others more explicitly talked about the relationships they felt they had with Boseman, such as this participant: I was sitting on the couch with my fiancé, playing on my phone. I believe it was HuffPo that popped in first. I gasped for air and sat in shock with my mouth wide open for about 30 seconds before he asked me what happened. I remember shaking and being in a state of disbelief. Not knowing he was sick and hearing of his passing was unreal. I cried. It felt like I lost a family member. A smart, handsome, successful, black man has just left us. I knew my pain was heavy so I immediately thought about his family and coworkers, the people that actually knew him and prayed for their peace.
Posting to Social Media about Boseman’s Death by Race.
RQ2b asked what individuals shared. Following the procedures used to address RQ1a, open-ended responses were qualitatively coded for themes. We again noted multiple themes, some of which had similarities to how participants felt upon first hearing the news of Boseman’s cancer death. Specifically, themes included emotional responses such as shock and sadness, with continued references to the difficulties of the year 2020 among the Black community. Participants expressed their own concerns around sharing information with family members, often as a way to further indicate their sadness and disbelief. Others specifically mentioned posting information online, sometimes just posting “RIP” or liking posts that others had shared about Boseman. For some participants, remembering how they used social media after the loss, even those who responded to the survey soon after he died, was difficult, mirroring common grief-related difficulties with memory loss (Maccallum & Bryant, 2010). For example, one participant said: I don’t remember what I posted. Other than it was a comment about being completely shocked. Something like “This news....No words…” And a few people responded in total shock as well. I texted a few people when the news broke, and shock was the universal reaction. It was like when Kobe died. Complete disbelief. Is this real? I reacted with a lot of sad emojis to others' posts and retweeted a few things.
Other participants clearly remembered what they posted. For example, one participant said: I shared an editorial cartoon that showed a gravestone with his name and had the caption “Avengers, assemble.” It showed Thor’s hammer and Captain America’s shield leaning on the tombstone. I don’t believe anyone commented but multiple people responded with the “sad” reaction and I think one other person reshared it.
A few participants expressed that they intentionally used their online presence to amply the voices of others and refrained from providing their own commentary: I mainly reposted some incredible art people had made of Chadwick Boseman, and a couple of videos that showed his wise-beyond-his-years humanity. My social media circles are small, but we're almost all involved in the industry, so it was mostly a way to acknowledge his death, celebrate his powerful legacy, and quietly leave space for friends to be unified in grief without inserting my own paltry commentary.
Others also made posts specific to the losses of the year or how the losses were very painful following an already difficult year. As one participant said: “I posted: Black people can’t have anything. My followers’ response was sympathetic.”
Several participants also mentioned sharing the initial post that was shared on Twitter, which potentially could be related to the fear of appearing to spread misinformation (which many people in the survey were concerned about) by relying on the post from Boseman’s official account. For example, one participant said: Shared the official statement from his Twitter account that someone else had shared with me. Added “Rest in Power, sir.” My social networks were shocked at his passing and a few folks re-shared my re-share.
Movie Watching After Boseman’s Death by Race.
RQ3b asked for those who did re-watch movies, would they perceive this media use as affecting them in some notable way. As before, two researchers coded the open-ended data. The most commonly re-watched movie reported by participants was Black Panther. Others re-watched 42, the movie where Boseman plays Jackie Robinson. This finding was interesting given that in 2020, Major League Baseball had previously designated August 28, the day of Boseman’s death, as Jackie Robinson Day. Other movies mentioned included Captain America: Civil War, 21 Bridges, Da 5 Bloods, Marshall, and Get On Up.
Multiple themes emerged about the perceived process and effects of re-watching Boseman’s movies. First, co-viewing was frequently reported, either in-person or by connecting via social media with others simultaneously watching the movie. Participants discussed that they gathered their family members who were with them during COVID-19 lockdowns to watch Boseman’s movies together.
For those who could not be physically together due to pandemic restrictions, they reported finding a sense of community via social media. One participant said, “Watching the movie at the same time as others was cathartic and an important reminder that his work lives on.” Another said “I watched Black Panther because Black people on Twitter held a mass watch party in his honor. I felt sad but encouraged by watching with a community.” The sense of community fostered by co-viewing appeared to help individuals process their grief and honor Boseman, too. Black Twitter, in particular, was mentioned multiple times, making the race-based social media community a sub-theme of the larging co-viewing theme.
Additionally, the fact that ABC aired Black Panther without commercials was noted by many participants. They stated that this made it easy for individuals to not only re-watch Boseman’s work, but to do so at the same time as others, resulting in a more communal experience.
A second prominent theme that emerged was that people found new and different meanings from re-watching the movies after Boseman’s death than they had previously associated with the work. In particular, multiple participants mentioned Black Panther’s connection to ancestors as being viewed differently now that Boseman was deceased. One wrote: “I cried at several moments. Especially the scenes where he goes back to his ancestors. So many lines have different meaning now. I also watched in awe that he turned in that performance as his body was ravaged by cancer and the treatments for it.”
This quote relates to a third theme that emerged, which was admiring the work Boseman was able to do while sick with cancer. It inspired individuals to think about how skilled and impressive Boseman was and to also think about the realities of cancer itself.
A fourth, and intertwined, major theme was the duality of experiencing both sadness and contentment from re-watching his work. One participant wrote: “Black Panther made me feel happy/sad. Grateful to have had that film in my lifetime and crushed that we won’t has another. Marshall made me feel in awe of his abilities. To know he did so much, gave so much while experiencing pain and treatment, he was a remarkable man.”
Others noted that they thought they would be sad re-watching his work, but actually felt happy more than anything. As stated by this participant: “I watched Black Panther about a week after his passing, which I periodically rewatch. I thought it would make me feel very sad, but it didn't - it was nice to see him in that role again, thinking of him doing something he (probably) loved.
RQ4a asked which variables would predict intentions to get screened for colon cancer. An ordinary least squares regression was run with screening intentions as the dependent variable and knowing someone else with colon cancer, Black race, age, audience involvement, attention paid to news of Boseman’s death, and sadness after learning the news as the predictors. These variables predicted 7.8% of the variance in screening intentions: F (6, 127) = 1.89, p = .088. However, only Black race was a significant predictor variable (Standardized regression weight = .21, p = .024). Additionally, attention paid to news of Boseman’s death approached statistical significance (Standardized regression weight = .19, p = .073).
RQ4b asked which variables would predict intentions to talk to other people about colon cancer. An ordinary least squares regression was run with screening intentions as the dependent variable and knowing someone else with colon cancer, Black race, age, audience involvement, attention paid to news of Boseman’s death, and sadness after learning the news as the predictors. These variables predicted 21.4% of the variance in talking intentions: F (6, 127) = 6.02, p < .001. Audience involvement (Standardized regression weight = .28, p = .015) was a significant and positive predictor of intentions to talk about colon cancer. Additionally, Black race approached statistical significance (Standardized regression weight = .14 p = .098). No other variables were significant.
Discussion
Our study applied a mixed methods approach to consider racial differences in audience responses to actor Chadwick Boseman’s colon cancer death. We were particularly interested in the role of media use as part of the parasocial grieving process, particularly for the Black community and in Black-specific online spaces like Black Twitter. The findings presented here also advance previous research on the effects of celebrity illness news by looking at racial differences in outcomes of interest and then examining open-ended responses to help add nuance to these data.
First, we found that Black participants in our study were more likely than non-Black participants to share information or their own thoughts and feelings on social media after Boseman’s death. The previous discussions, prior to his death, about Boseman on Black Twitter suggest the existence of a strong parasocial attachment to him that made social media an important gathering place for processing the news of his death. The process of sharing one’s feelings was mentioned as cathartic by many participants. This social media-based sharing may have been especially important for users during the COVID-19 pandemic when it was difficult to gather in person with people outside one’s immediate household. When they first heard the news of Boseman’s death, many participants in our study specifically mentioned his race and his stature as a prominent Black figure in society, suggesting the importance of Black-centric mediated spaces to process the grief associated with a Black celebrity’s cancer death.
Additionally, Black race was the only variable in our quantitative analysis that predicted (positively) intentions to pursue colon cancer screening. Given the racial disparities in colon cancer in the U.S. this finding suggests that Boseman’s death may have raised awareness of this disparity amongst those at higher risk. Exemplification and audience involvement literature suggests that seeing news coverage featuring individuals of the same race facing an illness can motivate individuals from that racial background to re-evaluate their own risk perceptions (Brown & Basil, 1995; Gibson & Zillmann, 2000; Mays et al., 1992). Further, it suggests that taking action to prevent the same disease he had may have been a way that Black audiences coped with their grief, but it was not a common coping mechanism for White audiences.
In our study, Black race also approached significance as a variable predicting intentions to talk about colon cancer with others, with audience involvement the only significant (and positive) predictor of intentions to talk to others about colon cancer. Notably, the Black race variable and the audience involvement scale were significantly correlated (r = .36, p < .001), but not highly so, suggesting that race alone, while a very important factor, is not the only consideration determining audience involvement with Boseman. Our data suggest the possibility that because he was such a beloved actor, Boseman’s death likewise motivated non-Black admirers to spread the word about colon cancer risks, which could have helpful ripples through public health given the importance of interpersonal communication in helping to amplify health messages (e.g., van den Putte et al., 2011).
We also noted themes in the qualitative data that may speak to the above findings. Specifically, some participants referenced wanting to further amplify the voices of others. While this may show up quantitatively as someone sharing information following Boseman’s death, it is different in terms of what was shared. For example, some participants indicated that they shared artwork by members of the Black community that portrayed Boseman. Other participants said they did not share, recognizing that others may have been more profoundly impacted, and they wanted to leave space for those voices. This qualitative data collected in conjunction with the quantitative data highlight the potential importance of future work to look more specifically at the type of engagement participants experience and the information shared.
Black participants in our study were also more likely than non-Black participants to re-watch Boseman’s movies after his death. This could have served as a form of mediated death ritual (Akhther & Tetteh, 2021; Sanderson & Hope Cheong, 2010). These cultural markers of grief and gathering may be especially important when the world was experiencing greater than usual amounts of death due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Boseman’s death from something other than COVID-19 caught the public interest in general, but particularly so for Black audiences that were also disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Indeed, references to 2020 as difficult and in many cases devastating were made by participants in our qualitative data.
The shared viewing of Boseman’s old movies provided a space, a couple hours long, to put the pandemic aside and grieve together. While previous work has shown that media use is one tool for coping with stress (Nabi et al., 2017), long movies with their ability to transport audiences into the story world (Green & Sestir, 2017) and help them make meaning out of difficult life experiences (Bartsch & Oliver, 2011) may be particularly helpful forms of media to use for coping with parasocial grief. Future research could investigate how different forms of media, like the interactive social media space of Black Twitter versus the long audiovisual space of a multi-hour superhero movie, influence coping and stress management processes.
The present study, though, is not without limitations. It employed a smaller, non-representative sample. It examines the instance of only one celebrity exemplar facing one type of illness. However, its strengths include integrating previous work on Black Twitter and media as a coping tool with the literature on audience response to celebrity illnesses and deaths and using qualitative data to help to further our understanding of potential quantitative findings. Based on our findings, future research may benefit from looking at more specific types of information sharing, such as whether people post original content, reshares, or view their sharing as an amplification of voices. Additionally, discrete emotions described in the qualitative data can provide another relevant avenue for future research. Shock and disbelief in addition to sadness were prominent emotions for our participants following news of his death and may motivate different actions, as discrete emotions may be associated with specific action tendencies.
Conclusion
Through our mixed methods study of audience experiences following the announcement of Chadwick Boseman’s death on social media, we examined racial differences, noting that Black participants were more likely to share information with others and re-watch movies. Participants used media following the announcement of Boseman’s death, likely as an expression of parasocial grief and a place to process their emotions and create a sense of community amid the pandemic. Black participants were also more likely to intend to pursue colon cancer screening, which is a positive outcome given the racial disparities in colon cancer deaths and the benefits of screening as a preventive health measure.
It is notable that the impact of Boseman’s death on Black communities is continually reflected in online conversations to this day. For instance, minutes after actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars in response to an off-script joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s bald head, messages posted by Black users on Twitter reminded others within the network of the online reaction to Boseman’s appearance in April 2020, and the collective guilt expressed following his death: “When both #ChadwickBoseman and #TraciBraxton passed, y’all said, ‘stop making jokes like that, cuz you don’t know what are people going through,’ but y’all don’t have no smoke for #ChrisRock? #Oscars” (Hamilton, 2022). Such messages indicate that Twitter remains a viable space for collecting data that reflects user sentiment about parasocial relationships with celebrities, including connections forged as a result of the celebrity’s illness or death.
With the coming release of additional Black Panther movies, these without Boseman, future work can build off our findings to see how mediated reflections of grief shift over time, particularly in different digital cultural spaces used by different types of people. We hope the present study offers a helpful case for investigating cultural aspects of both grief responses to and media use surrounding celebrity deaths from cancer and other preventable illnesses.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
