One of the key tenets of American intellectual history is the relationship between Black Americans and the state. A wide array of books written in recent years—Martha Jones Birthright Citizenship and Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, among so many others—come to mind. Undoubtedly, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s, and its resurgence during the tumultuous year of 2020, also played a role in the expansion of this scholarship. All of these factors must be kept in mind when reading, and sitting with, Biko Mandela Gray’s Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject. For Gray, Read more