Black Life Matter Blackness, Religion, and the Subject Talk with Biko Gray

Join us for a book talk and conversation with Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and author of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject. This book talk will include a conversation and wider Q&A led by Ristina Gooden, PhD student in Homiletics and Liturgics, and Royal Todd, PhD student in Religion, Ethics, & Society with a light reception following.

In Black Life Matter, Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality. Gray employs a theoretical method he calls “sitting-with”—a philosophical practice of care that seeks to defend the dead and the living. He shows that the police who killed Stanley-Jones and Rice reduced them to their bodies in ways that turn black lives into tools that the state uses to justify its violence and existence. He outlines how Bland’s arrest and death reveal the affective resonances of blackness, and he contends that Sterling’s physical movement and speech before he was killed point to black flesh as unruly living matter that exceeds the constraints of the black body. These four black lives, Gray demonstrates, were more than the brutal violence enacted against them; they speak to a mode of life that cannot be fully captured by the brutal logics of antiblackness.

This event is a collaboration by the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality and the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies.

Dr. Biko Mandela Gray is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at University of Houston. As a philosopher of religion concerned about matters of ethics, Black life and death, and religion, his research and teaching are focused on the relationship between Black life, philosophy of religion, and political theology. He has published written or co-written two books: Black Life Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Co-authored with Ryan Johnson, Edinburgh, 2022); and he's co-edited (along with Stephen Finley and Lori Latrice Martin) Religion of White Rage (Edinburgh, 2020). Beyond this, he's authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters that explore questions of ethics, political theology, and architecture through the lenses of Black critical theory and philosophy of religion.

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