“The Intellectual Matter of Black Lives”: Robert Greene II on Biko Mandela Gray’s *Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject*

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, the concern about Black lives truly mattering is one that we as a society must all wrestle with—especially in the realm of religious studies and race.

Gray urges the reader to carefully consider how Black life in American society has been shaped by numerous forms of violence, oppression, and suppression. “Black Life Matter¸” puts forth Gray, “argues that the normative subjects of this world are sustained by the symbolic, physical, philosophical, and religious violence they enact against black life, against black lives” (5). In other words, it is impossible to imagine modern American society without the history of anti-Black violence. Gray studies this phenomenon through deep study of four Black Americans who died during encounters with law enforcement: Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland.

Gray demands that the reader sit with him as he meditates on both the long history of Black suffering in American history, and how that suffering necessarily affects American—and Black American—thought, culture, and action over the long arc of history. This is not a pleasant task, Gray reminds us. “I wrote this text,” Gray tells us, “because I haven’t moved on, because sitting-with requires the sometimes painful commitment to remain and remember” (8). What becomes certain in Black Life Matters, however, is that intellectually speaking, historians will have to find some way to come to terms with what has happened in the debate over Black life in America in recent years.

Part of this is reckoning with what several other scholars of the Black experience have said about Black life in modern America. Gray’s work constantly evokes Christina Sharpe. The importance of Sharpe’s work becomes clear in the book. Pairing this book with Sharpe’s recent work Ordinary Notes (released in 2023) makes plenty of logical sense, as they both offer meditations on Black life. Another key scholar that Gray refers to several times is Fred Moten, and in particular Moten’s own meditations on and arguments about the idea of Blackness in modern society. “Yes, Black Life Matter is a play a on the phrase, but it is also meant to underscore how black lives move through the world as living matter or, put differently how black lives move as flesh” (20). In other words, there is a significant attempt by Gray to examine every aspect of what we mean when we say “Black lives matter,” and pairing that with the now nearly-ubiquitous phrase “Black body.” All of these, as we see in Gray’s text, have critical meaning for intellectual thought in modern life.

One key aspect of Gray’s book is its attempt to force a conversation between religious studies and the problems facing Black people in America. Gray posits that his book “challenges philosophy of religion to sit with black lives in their unruly and disruptively fleshy presence” (24). Gray invokes the term theodicy to properly define the “process of identifying, categorizing, and ultimately eradicating what has been called evil” in modern life (25). One of the critical parts of the book many readers will appreciate is Gray’s deft handling of a wide array of ideas—from the profane and the sacred alike.

Each chapter in Black Life Matter covers a different person who, over the previous ten years, became one of the remembered victims of police brutality in the 2010s. In them, Gray sees a different issue around Black life truly mattering in American society. The chapter titles—“Black Bodies as Mere Corporeal Matter,” “Black Flesh as Living Matter,” and “Blackness as Affective Matter”—all refer back to Gray’s original argument of how Black life, or Black flesh, has been stretched and transformed by events in American and world history into what it symbolizes today.

Methodologically speaking, the book is a rich mélange of a variety of theoretical frameworks, and judicious uses of different definitions of Blackness. If anything, Black Life Matter is a critical read for anyone interested in broader Black studies, Black history, or studies of Black culture. As mentioned earlier, Gray uses key scholars of the Black experience in his text. Saidiya Hartman is another key figure, as Gray argues that her argument that “the history of thoughtlessness” in American history “is intimately connected to the history of blackness” (36). Matter and thought through the visage of the Black body—of Black flesh—remains the main theme of Black Life Matter.

Ultimately, Black Life Matter is an important work that many intellectual historians should try to grapple with. At the least, it asks us to think deeply about how important Blackness—in the numerous forms it has taken in American and global history—has been to the broad project of Western thought. Perhaps more importantly, it asks us to also take Black people seriously, as subjects of inquiry, study, and, quite simply, as people, struggling along in society like anyone and everyone else.