African Americans and their ancestors have been subjected to forms of violence premised upon the supremacy of the state as ultimate, immutable, transcendent. This supremacy usually manifests itself as an insidious, covert form of white supremacy coded as “law and order.” This article investigates the nature of white supremacy as state violence in the wake of the deaths of both Eric Garner and Mike Brown, arguing that the vindication of police officers is a form of theodicy, one that protects the divine state from charges of injustice and, more bluntly, evil. The response to this theodicean form of reasoning—a form that consistently subjects Black bodies to multiple forms of suffering and death and justifies that death by recourse to the power of this state—is atheism. This form of atheism is not a rejection of the traditional concept of God but rather an immanent atheism that rejects the transmutation of the state as divine and above reproach.
Recent scholarship on Black Lives Matter has focused on the political, economic, intellectual, and theological context/s out of which the movement arises, but there has been little engagement with the movement from the perspective of philosophy of religion or history of religions. Phenomenologically, Black life in the United States is relegated to the unthought experience and habitual reenactment of tying one's shoes. But Black people are not shoes in need of tying, so Black people live impossible lives in the United States. BLM sacralizes this impossible mode of existence in three ways: first, BLM amplifies impossible black existence; second, BLM exemplifies the impossible Black sociality; and third, BLM reminds the country that Black life is simultaneously indispensable and unthought. Through the hashtags, speak outs, and direct actions, BLM celebrates the irreducible sacredness of Black life in the United States.
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