Celeste builds an essay around a figure she names the wailing black woman: the mourning mother whose public grief is offered as evidence of injustice. The starting point is Rihanna singing about wanting to scream, which Celeste hears as an expression of frustration shared by black women across the diaspora whose footing with the state and society remains insecure.

The essay tracks how that figure has been represented over time before settling on the reality series The First 48, which films victims' relatives at their rawest. Celeste takes up sociologist Herman Gray's invitation to examine what media images make audiences feel, treating the sentiment that collects around coverage of people of color as a form of labor.

Two questions organize the argument: how the wailing woman is enlisted in familiar stories about black death, criminality, and citizenship, and what her affective labor might disrupt. She appears both as a warning the program issues and as a potentially oppositional figure.