Religion in/and Black Lives Matter: Celebrating the impossible

Abstract

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.

A Flowering of Memory

“…even the dead continue to signify " (1986: 147). Th is essay situates Hurston's cemetery garden as a critical landscape of Black celebration and solemnifi cation (Clift on 2012: 427;Williamson 2017: 9;Moten 2018: 200;Gray 2019). Black womanist understandings of life and death are not oppositional binaries, but death opens into expanded possibilities of being and becoming, aff ording the dead and other intermediary spirit beings a vital agency in Black communal life (Manigault-Bryant 2014;Wells-Oghoghomeh 2021).…”