Thursday, April 6, 2023 - Center for the Study of World Religions held its annual Greeley Lecture in Peace and Social Justice (Race, Religion, and Nationalism Series), welcoming Biko Gray, Assistant Professor of American Religion at Syracuse University to the podium.
“Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for justice.” These words, uttered by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were offered in memory of George Floyd. Pelosi would eventually apologize for her words, but the question remains: why did she make this claim? In this talk, Gray suggests that one of the reasons this is possible is because blackness—and therefore black life—operates as a structure of dis/appearance. To an antiblack world, blackness appears largely in the moments that it is dead—which is to say, in the moments that it has disappeared. This (ghostly) structure of dis/appearance is, I argue, how religious ideas—such as theodicy, atonement, and yes, even justice—are steeped in (a need for) black death.
Full transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Disappearing, Black life, Theodicy, and the Study of Religion. April 6, 2023.
CHARLES STANG: All right, good-- I was going to say good evening, but it's, in fact, afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Charles Stang. I have the privilege of serving as the director here at the CSWR at the Divinity School. So welcome to the center's annual Greeley Lecture for Peace and Social Justice. This is not our usual time for annual lectures, and I think we are running up against some afternoon seminars. But due to the Maundy Thursday, we decided to move the lecture earlier.
So this year, we are very privileged to host Professor Biko Mandela Gray, whose lecture, Disappearing, Black Life, Theodicy, and the Study of Religion, is certain to stimulate and challenge. And please let me take this opportunity to offer a word of sincerest thanks to the Greeley Foundation for the gift that established this. So this is the fifth year in which we've devoted the Greeley Lecture to the theme of race, religion and nationalism.
Five years ago, Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, helped us inaugurate the series with a lecture entitled Claiming God's Peace When Whiteness Stands its Ground. The series is a response to the fact that across the world today, we witness an alarming rise in old nationalisms, each of which deploys, openly or covertly, the rhetoric of race and racial hierarchy and the rhetoric of religion and religious hierarchy.
We see this happening across Europe, in the Middle East, in South Asia, and of course, most acutely, right here in the United States where white Christian nationalism had a significant foothold in our federal government during the last administration. Some might say it still does or that it always has. This series at the Center seeks to critically examine this phenomenon at home and abroad. We want to ask such questions as, to what degree does religion fuel racialized nationalism?
In the American context, for example, how does Christianity support white nationalism? To what degree is white nationalism a sort of religion itself with its own myths, rituals, and ways of life? And to what degree are different racialized nationalisms affiliating with each other to form international networks? A number of prominent Black intellectuals have spoken in this series, as I mentioned, Kelly Brown Douglas, but also Harvard's own Cornell Brooks, Fred Moten, and last year, Anthea Butler.
This year, it's a great honor to add to that distinguished list Mr Biko Mandela Gray, who is assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Professor Gray's work operates at the nexus and interplay between continental philosophy of religion and theories and methods in African-American religion. His research is primarily on the connection between race, subjectivity in religion and embodiment, exploring how these four categories play on one another in the concrete space of human experience.
He's also interested in the religious implications of social justice movements. His most recent book, Black Life Matter from Duke University Press, Blackness, Religion and the Subject, explores how contemporary racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter demonstrates new ways of theorizing the connection between embodiment, religion, and subjectivity. Christina Sharpe, Professor at York University says of Gray's new book, "Black Life Matter is a powerful and moving book, challenge and a rejoinder to white Western philosophy, deep thinking from Black flesh.
This book becomes more urgent and more necessary with each passing day." Professor Gray is no stranger here to the center. In 2020, he and his colleagues Professors Stephen Findlay and Latrice Martin offered a webinar on their edited volume, The Religion of White Rage. It's a joy and a privilege to welcome Professor Gray back, this time, in person. Professor Gray, thank you again. The floor is yours.
[APPLAUSE]
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: So as is often the case, I come from a young Black church kojic background, and so we have this thing called protocol. So let me do that really quickly and begin by thanking, first off, the Center for the Study of World Religions more generally, and Charles Stang, the director, more directly. I appreciate you for inviting me. I will restrain from calling you Charlie in public, but you are a good friend of mine.
And so it is great to be back. I see a lot of folks. I also want to thank Professor N Fadeke Castor who has invited me too. And I cannot wait to talk and hang out with you. I'm thankful again to the Center, thankful to all the folks who made this happen. Hilary and Lori, thank you all so much. I really do appreciate it. I'm saying all these thanks because I see a lot of people in the crowd who I know. And so I wish I could list each and every one of you, all of you who means so much to me, who are friendly and who have been friends.
All right, OK, I'm going to stop. The one person that I want to thank the most though and signal her out and embarrass her a little bit is the most important person in my life, my best friend, my confidant, the person in whom I live and move and have my being. Her name is Andrea Sawyer-Gray, and she is sitting right there. And I'm so thankful that you decided to come up and fly up to hang out with me this weekend. You all can give it up for her actually.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Yeah. With that in mind, all the thanks out the way, protocol being set, we will go ahead and get started. The title of my talk today is Disappearing. I think the subtitle has shifted a little bit, but Black Life, Theodicy, and the Study of Religion will stick. I have a couple of epigraphs. I wish I could give you all PowerPoint slides. I kind of tend to find them a little boring, so I'm going to hope the strength of my writing can keep you all awake at this hour. I'm going to show a video here in a bit.
This is actually the beginning, the very, very early beginning of my sort of-- another work that I'm thinking about in terms of Toni Morrison. And so I'm wanting to theorize Black religion through Toni Morrison's work. But you will not hear a lot of Toni Morrison today. She shows up very briefly at the end as a gesture. I do that intentionally because I'm working the ideas out here, not the prose. That's important for me to say. I'm working the ideas out, not the prose.
So I begin with two or one guide quote from Charles Long. Quote, "they were present, not as voices, but as the silence which is necessary to all speech. They existed as the pauses between words, those pauses which are necessary if speech is to be possible. And in their silence, they spoke. In their silence, they spoke." In this talk, I want to talk about justice.
I want to think about its limits. I want to explore the ways that it can be violent, that justice is violent. I want to think about the violence of justice, the violence that is justice because I am struggling. As legislators attempt to erase blackness and Black life, as they denigrate critical race theory, something of which they know nothing about, and as you all know of this too well, men and women in robes salivate over admissions lawsuits that constitute yet another blow to the few civil rights Black people have in this country.
As Black calls to and for redress are met with limp and vapid legislation, if anything is done at all, I am struggling to find justice. No, that's not quite right. I've found justice, but I've also found that I am not welcome under its sacred canopy. I have found that though I desire it, justice wants nothing to do with me. My desire is unrequited I call and it responds, but with dismissal, platitudes, and the violence of surveillance and policing.
I am not old but I'm getting older. And in being older, I have had to make a sobering realization, realizing I am not simply a threat to justice. I am what it militates against. I give it meaning. I call it into being through my death, through my very erasure. I wrote about this dynamic in a little bit and actually a lot of it in my first book, Black Life Matter. There, I explored justice and its violence through specific encounters between Black people and the police.
Here, I want to elaborate on what I wrote there, but also gesture in different directions. So I therefore have personal reasons for wanting to think about justice, but I have professional ones too. I am, after all, a philosopher of religion. And it seems to me that justice, even though we want to reduce it to a political concept, justice is central to religion and its study. God, which is to say the Christian God-- appreciate the alley-oop Charlie-- God, which is to say the Christian God guarantees it.
The other God sometimes call for it, though what they have in mind is often not what humans have in mind. And humans, being faithful to God and/or the gods, believe or are made to believe in justice. Suffice it to say, justice is not merely a political concept. It combines ethics and faith. It is a praxis steeped in myth. Whether this myth be national, cosmogonic, or theurgic, justice and religion are and perhaps have always been good bedfellows, and perhaps that's the problem.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. I said earlier that I'm a philosopher of religion. And in my training, I was taught that philosophers have argued about the relationship between God and justice for centuries. Leibniz coined a term for it, a term that many of already, theodicy. And as many of you also know, theodicy is that boring line of thinking that tries to justify God's goodness in the face of unrelenting and unremitting evil. Theodicy then is a structure of reason, philosophical reason, ethical reason.
It gives reasons for why things are, how they are, for why we should trust that things should get better. Justifying the state of affairs, providing reasons for why things are the way they are, or providing a hope for something better in the end, theodicy encourages what philosopher of religion William R Jones once called quietism. Theodicy shuts things down. It quashes resistance.
It silences protest. But it doesn't do these things through brute force. Theodicy enacts its quietistic work through one of its constitutive concepts, justice. Yearning for justice that will never come or will only come in the end, whatever the end may mean, theodicy operates as a tool of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism. It gives us, well, some of us, hope in something that will harm or kill us.
To put this bluntly, and because I'm a philosopher of Black religion, theodicy is an anti-Black enterprise. It is not friendly to Black life. I'm not alone in saying this. In 1973, William Jones wondered aloud if God was a white racist. In 1994, Anthony Penn riffed off of Jones to remind us that, over the course of US history, theodicy has produced the idea that Black suffering and death have a positive or redemptive character.
And africana philosopher, Lewis Gordon, secularizes the theodicy question, calling our attention to the ways that white nation states have become metonyms for God and God's goodness and power, a goodness and power that required anti-Black expiation and violence. As Gordon puts it, Blackness is the theodicy of European modernity. So no, I'm not alone. I stand on the shoulders of these thinkers.
I seek to extend the path they have laid out. In different ways, at different times, and for different reasons, each of these thinkers has taught me that, at least when it comes to Blackness and Black people, theodicy is a futile and brutal enterprise. Or to put it more bluntly and philosophically, theodicy is a necessarily anti-Black mode of reason. It is important that we understand that, that what is happening when Black people are being killed and murdered and brutalized, that is reason.
That is not irrational. That is not outside of something. It is sacred but it is also rational. It is important that we understand that. If this is the case-- and people are going to be mad at me about this-- if theodicy is anti-Black, then justice, a concept central to theodicy and thinking, to theodicy and reasoning, is also anti-Black. That's my argument today-- justice is anti-Black.
That's my claim. And in order to make this claim, I want to tell a story. It wasn't intentional, she didn't mean it this way. She didn't mean it the way it came out. It just was that the news was so good, justice had been served. And she was a political leader after all. She knew she needed to say something, so she called a press conference, surrounded by Black women who were also political leaders.
And living in a nation where religion and justice are intertwined, she stood there in front of the cameras and said the quiet part out loud, "Thank you, George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice." After thanking her God and then her Jesus, or was it Karen Bass's and Donna Brazile's Jesus, I'm never quite clear on the clip, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi siphoned a redemptive meaning from a scene of unrelenting and brutal-- I mean, unrelenting and lethal brutality.
Many people many, Black people found this offensive. Finding this out, Pelosi clarified her remarks. She tweeted out, quote, "George Floyd should be alive today. His family's calls for justice for his murder were heard around the world. He did not die in vain. He did not die in vain. We must make sure other families don't suffer the same racism, violence, and pain. And we must enact-- surprise-- the George Floyd justice in Policing Act." Unquote.
It wasn't a full apology. In fact, it wasn't an apology at all. For Pelosi, George Floyd did not die in vain. His death was indeed a gift, a gift that may not have been given freely, . But a gift nonetheless a gift in service of justice. A gift in service of setting things right. Derek Chauvin's conviction signaled, at least for her anyway, that things were exactly as she thought, America will always set things right.
A new bill would be signed. Reforms would come. It is horrible that someone had to die for all of this to happen, but it would be a real missed opportunity, wouldn't it, if the country didn't take advantage? justice was served. New laws would be passed. The country would be better off. Thank you, George Floyd. When I heard about Pelosi's remarks and then heard them, I was one of those offended Black people.
As a philosopher of Black religion, I had thought and written about, quote, "unwilling sacrifices," unquote. Our deaths are gifts, but they are not given freely. They are taken, stolen, and then culled and stripped for whatever redemptive meaning they might have. When it comes to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence, if we are martyrs, if we are martyred, this martyrdom is not volitional. It is unwilling. It is marked by choke cries of stifled breath. It is punctuated by cries to one's mother.
It happens when one sleeps or as one's car breaks down or in front of a convenience store or at a park or in a street. To be murdered and then to have one's death used for justice, that is Black life here in the United States. So in the moment, when it happened, I'll admit I was angered, outraged, disgusted by the then speaker's remarks. But time affords you the space to think, it allows for a certain kind of clarity, even if it doesn't allow for change.
So when I was invited to give this lecture, I remembered this scene and I also remembered a quotation in Christina Sharpe's In The Wake, who I cannot seem to think without. Quoting Joy James and Joao Acosta Vargas, Sharpe writes, quote-- or she's actually quoting these folks-- "what happens"-- they ask a lot of questions-- "what happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a Black person is killed in the US, we recognize Black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy?
What will happen then if, instead of demanding justice, we recognize or at least consider that the very notion of justice produces and requires Black death as normative?" Riffing off of James and Costa Vargas, Sharpe elaborates, quote, "the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative, and for this so-called democracy, necessary." Unquote.
Quote, "it is the ground we walk on." Unquote. Remembering these quotations, I calmed my nerves. I slowed down. I thought about it. I sat with it. Today's talk is the result of sitting with that scene and its effects. Thanking Floyd for losing his life might be tone deaf. But after slowing down, it is clear to me, Pelosi wasn't wrong, or more precisely, she wasn't inaccurate.
The justice that was served was only made possible through Floyd's death. I call this a secular atonement. Justice was found in and through the brutal the brutal public murder of a Black man. In Pelosi's speech, religion and justice intertwine to produce what I'm calling a public theodicy of anti-Blackness. It is brutal but it is true. And though this country has moved on, I think it is prudent that we remain here.
In fact, I think moving on is precisely what makes theodicy so brutal. Theodicy provides the philosophical and theological resources to move on, to get over by justifying the violence, by reminding people that things will be or already are good. Theodicy, especially when it comes to Black life, offers resources for forgetting, for letting go, for leaving Blackness and Black life behind.
As I say in my first book, I don't mean to plug, but I've been thinking about this for a little while, so I'll just quote myself, which seems weird to do. But quote, "the cops kills so much, that it's hard to keep track. So you shed a tear, post something via social media, and move on. Or conversely and on a wider scale, you draft a vapid piece of legislation, make a speech, celebrate or bring awareness to something, and move on. Once you've done your piece, the life no longer matters."
I'm not quoting myself to sound smart. I'm doing so to lay claim to the fact that every, or the very act of moving on, of moving past or getting over, as Calvin Warren might say, is fueled in and through a theodician structure of progress that justifies the deaths it supposedly mourns. Dis you all catch that? Theodicy justifies the deaths that it says that it mourns through a discourse of progress.
Everything happens for a reason, we are told. Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice. I'm staying here with this quote because I believe moving on is precisely what motivated Pelosi's comments. She needed to move on. I cannot determine what she wanted to do. But by naming the verdict as an act of justice and by thanking Floyd for his death, she sanctioned and perpetuated what Charles Long might call a structure of concealment that is central to American religion, a structure that does not only allow for white people and often other non-Black people to ease their conscience.
But also allows for them to continually forget what they have done, what they continue to do, what they continue to allow to happen. Long himself puts it this way-- y'all think I'm going in? [CHUCKLES] Sorry, I was reading it earlier, and yeah-- quote, "the religion of the American people centers around the telling and retelling of the mighty deeds of the white conquerors. This story--" and this is where things get real.
"This story hides the true experience of Americans from their very eyes. The invisibility of Indigenous Native Americans and Blacks is matched by a void or deeper invisibility within the consciousness of white Americans. The inordinate fear that white people have of minorities is an expression of the fear that they have when they contemplate the possibility of seeing themselves as they really are."
That's Dr. long. When refracted through Charles Long's work, Pelosi's public act of gratitude becomes an enactment of rhetorical violence, political repression, and religious concealment. So make no mistake, George Floyd's death was not in vain, not for Pelosi and certainly not for this country, for without his death, there would have been no verdict. And without the verdict, there would have been no progress. No one was going to-- and no one was going to actually defund, let alone abolish the police.
That was a bridge too far. But reforms would and could happen. And in that verdict and in those reforms progress will have been made. Pelosi wasn't inaccurate. She did the right thing, which is to say she did the American thing, an American thing that is, that is if I'm following long correctly, a religious thing. Long spoke of this religious thing in terms of concealment and meaning in the depths of the structure of experience.
I speak of it in terms of theodicy, drawing from my other intellectual ancestor William R. Jones. Either way, there is a commitment to and conviction in moving on in the name of progress. And that commitment that conviction, and yes, even that progress, all of that is only made possible through the violent repression, eradication, and forgetfulness of Black life. This is a total aside, there is a reason why white conservative folks are trying to erase Black history through the guise of denigrating critical race theory.
That isn't simply, oh, some culture war thing. I just I just needed to say that as it sort of came to me. It is an attempt to erase Black people from the very structure of United States history. And if you can do that, if you can do that, then you can say we are no longer a race-based nation, which means we are a colorblind country. Progress. I just needed to say that out loud. Sorry for moving off the script, but it hit me as I was thinking about this.
So how is all of this possible? What allows for this to continue? I'm still working this out, but. My hunch is this-- the American notion of progress, which as we have seen, is a theodician notion of anti-Black concealment, erasure, and forgetting, is also made possible by what I call a phenomenological structure of this appearance, this the slash, you get it, it's the post structuralist thing to do. Don't judge me. That's where it had to go, all right?
I would have been saying appearance and disappearance all the time, so this seemed the easiest way to do it. Phenomenological structure of disappearance or to turn to my book again, and hopefully for the last time, actually, I know this is the last time, Black Lives, quote, "appear to us in the very moments in which they disappear." I'll say that again, "Black Lives appear to us in the very moments in which they disappear." They are, quote, "lost to us in the very moment we come to know who they are." Unquote.
In other words, this structure of progress, theodician and anti-Black as it may be, is possible because Black Lives are as Jacques Derrida and Ronaldo Walcott remind us, Black Lives are hauntological. We haunt the very structure of American life, and in so doing, we haunt the very development of American religion and its study. Let me lay this out real quick, slash, I think I've got just a couple more pages, y'all. I'm sorry.
Let me lay this out real quick. I want us to return to, if we can, if you can return back in your minds to the summer of 2020. Protesters are filling the streets. Donald Trump is taking photo ops while paramilitary forces quash Black resistance. The country is not simply affected by a global pandemic. It is plagued by what to many news outlets are calling, for some strange reason, a racial reckoning. This all happened because someone recorded a man choking another man to death in the street.
The country did not know either of their names before June. I certainly didn't. But the camera was enough. The recorded suffocation drew national attention. Floyd's name became a hashtag, his face a mural. His visage became a synecdoche for so many other police killings, it became a symbol of and for a certain kind of mourning and remembrance as well as a certain kind of allyship. Money was spent and donated and exploited.
Corporations plastered Black Lives Matter everywhere. NBA players got new jerseys with terms like equality and justice on the back. Forgive me for laughing. But think about it, we didn't George Floyd. We know that, right? We don't know him now, honestly. What we know, what we can only ever know is a simulacrum, a hashtag, a photo, a mural, a painting, and sadly, a video.
Those of us who marched and protested for Floyd did so as an act of mourning. He was no longer with us, and that can never be undone. But we did speak his name and then Breonna Taylor's and then Ahmaud Arbery's, and before that, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland and Philando Castile. And the list goes on and on. And that's the point, the list goes on and on.
With each new hashtag, with each new name added to the list, each new entry in what Kathryn McKittrick might call a brutal mathematics of the unloving, we are reminded of the interminable, random yet somehow predictable violence of cops killing Black people. With each name added to the list, with each new hashtag and data entry, the other older names come back. They haunt the new names. You all see this? Do you all see what I'm saying?
They haunt the new names. Breonna Taylor wasn't the first Black person, let alone Black fem to be killed in her sleep. Floyd was not the first person to use his last breaths to ironically claim, I can't breathe. We had been here before, but this before seems to always come back, or to put it more bluntly, this country is haunted by the Black Lives who have been killed.
Quote, "first suggestion, haunting is historical to be sure, but it is not dated. It is never docilely given a date in the chain of presence day after day according to the instituted order of a calendar." Unquote. Derrida's discussion of haunting inspectors of Marx is complicated. And while I will be discussing him a little bit more, I am not interested in either demonstrating his brilliance or mine. I bring up this quotation to punctuate, to call to our attention the way that hauntings work.
And hauntings work, they only work to the extent that they are a surprise, that they appear whenever and wherever. But this isn't the only thing that makes a haunting a haunting. What makes a haunting a haunting, what makes a haunting what Derrida will call hauntological is the fact that the specter, the ghost also threatens to show itself. You cannot prepare for the apparition of a specter.
And more to the point, the ghost appearance is always, always a reappearance. So the ghost can keep showing up at any time. And once you are haunted, once you are haunted, you are always threatened by the possibility that that ghost can come back if. You have read Beloved, you know about sour ghosts of air in red lights that show up out of nowhere, in baby shugs, who tells-- you all know. Hmm.
What shows itself can only show itself as a repetition, as a return, as a coming back from wherever it once was. Let me be concrete here and stop playing in the philosophical clouds. What I mean to say is this, with each name added to the list, as I've said before, the other names come back, not the people though. The names, the images, the simulacra of a life that remind this country of what it has done and what it hasn't done.
What appears before us in the wake of a state-sanctioned anti-Black killing is never the person, the actual life of a human. No. What appears before us is a hollowed-out apparition, a phantasmagoric necrophony that we subject our political-- to which we subject our political ideologies, and out of which we conjure to confirm our goodness. Looking up at the sky in the name of a God about whom she was unsure, Nancy Pelosi did not actually thank George Floyd.
She thanked George Floyd. She thanked a name, the linguistic residue of a life once lived, the terminal logical surplus of a flesh-and-blood man who was survived by a young daughter and a large and loving family. I should have said this at the beginning. I tend to get emotional when I talk about this stuff. And in this particular case, I had the opportunity to meet George Floyd's baby's mom. I don't know if they were married. And so I'm actually, as I'm reading this, I'm thinking of her right now.
So forgive me if I get emotional. She thanked the name, the linguistic residue of a life once lived, the terminal logical surplus of a flesh-and-blood man who was survived by a young daughter and a large and loving family. How do I know this? Because she thanked him for doing something he never wanted to do. Thanking George Floyd was only possible because she couldn't have and probably wouldn't have.
She's not a psychic-- well, she probably wouldn't have asked him to willingly undergo what he did. She would have never walked up to the flesh-and-blood man George Floyd and said, you know what? I need you to give your life for justice. She would have never did it. But she can thank the name, the ghost, the residue, the thing that haunts her, she can think that because it is subjected to her whims and her imagination, she can thank-- she can thank the name.
As a representative of this country, as a national leader, Nancy Pelosi was haunted by George Floyd. He came from nowhere, which is to say his death came from nowhere. His death changed the world. His death was an event. Quote, "repetition and first time, this is perhaps the question of the event as the question of the ghost." I'll say it again. "This is perhaps the question of the event as the question of the ghost, repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time." That's Derrida.
I understand what's going on and all I want you all to hear in that is that the event is articulated as a ghost. Forgive me, this is how he talks. He talks in circles because, well, yeah-- anyway, Floyd's death, that event was the first and last time. It was definitely a last time. It punctuated sharp and set in sharp relief that he wasn't the only one. But the verdict will also contextualize that event. But the verdict also contextualized that event.
It was evidence that his death was also a first time. It was something different, setting in relief while giving it, reminding us that he wasn't the only while-- that he wasn't the only one, while well being the only one, George Floyd haunted and still haunts the United States. Well, that's not quite right. George Floyd, like Breonna Taylor, like the infinite list that keeps on growing, they didn't haunt the US.
They were hauntological. And I keep saying this because it is important. We only know him because he died. That is the structure of a hauntology. It's not simply just that the ghost shows up. It is that this thing appears as the inner parent. That is important, that the logical is a very structure of appearance and that if I were to be frank, I am showing up as a ghost right now.
This is what Black people do. This is what Ronaldo Walcott articulates and I will say a little bit later. Actually, I'm about to say it right now. This apparition of the inner parent, this movement of non presence, this event of appearance and disappearance makes us unsure of ourselves. It makes us wary. It leaves us bereft of our own cognitive resources. Listen to Ronaldo Walcott. Quote, "it is at the point of event and repetition that Black life is made both present and unbelievable.
Black life generally finds itself in a repeated cycle of being spectacularized often through visual representations in popular culture. At the same time and more specifically, the state violence that is repeatedly inflicted on Black people is seen as otherworldly and somehow unbelievable." Now again listen to Nancy Pelosi. We all saw it on TV. We all saw it happen.
And thank God the jury validated what we saw. Pelosi has to thank God-- again, there's that theodicy and language, that logic-- has to thank God for the jury validating what we saw. What is the need for this validation, for this affirmation? Why the repetition of we all saw it? I want to suggest here that this repetition happens because Pelosi knows what Walcott knows, namely, that anti-Black violence is, quote, unquote, "somehow not believable."
Walcott continues, quote, "the video recorded evidence in body of the dead Black person are not enough. They are not enough to secure belief that what has happened, has taken place is in fact a murder." That evidence is not enough. And thank God the jury validated what we saw. Walcott continues, "thus through a logic of disbelief, Black life is produced as both immediately present and immediately absent, appeared and disappeared." Unquote.
I'm almost done, y'all. What Pelosi knows, what she cannot help but know, is that ironclad evidence is never ironclad, not when it comes to Black people. What appears can always be contested. And if I had time, I would talk to you about one of what Chauvin's defense attorneys talked about, which they called a sort of force is unattractive theory, which is to say things look worse on camera than they actually are. And so the recording of this killing, they argue, this is what he had to do and it looks worse on camera.
It's not nearly as bad as you think it is. And that's the structure of this belief that I am talking about, that even evidence of a murder can be understood as not evidence of a murder. And that happens because Black life is hauntological. Knowing this, knowing this, Pelosi thinks God, Jesus, and George Floyd for providing the conditions in the occasion for conviction. Justice has been served. There might be more work to do, but at the end of the day, the hardest of hard parts is over.
Securing the conviction, both of her beliefs and of Derek Chauvin, Nancy Pelosi declared victory. It was time to move on or at least move forward. And this moving on, this moving forward was only possible because Pelosi was haunted, because George Floyd lived and died in a time, quote, "out of joint," unquote, with the normative world. Haunted not simply by George Floyd, but also by the other deaths that his name silently invoked. Nancy Pelosi sent him on his way.
She thanked him for giving his life, which is to say she sought to get over the hauntological presence that George Floyd signified. Floyd, like so many others, has appeared in disappeared-- or disappeared to the American consciousness. And in their wakes, after these Black people die, progress moves. A theodicy is instantiated and maintained.
Justice is served, and that justice is and remains anti-Black, haunted by the deaths it requires to sustain itself, and therefore, requiring more deaths to keep the threat of the ghosts at bay. As I said before, justice is anti-Black, always. But thankfully, that anti-Blackness is not the whole story. Got a little left. This is the conclusion.
In significations, Charles Long underscores the power of silence. Silence is not simply the absence of speech, long intimates. It is also the condition for speech. Atuning his attention to those who have been silenced, Long suggests that the very epistemological political and religious structures of Western modernity are only made possible in and through this silence-- in and through the silenced. But Long reminds us they remained-- they remain and they spoke.
And that was the epigraph from the beginning. In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggested that the most profound ethics and a certain kind of justice is only opened up by, quote, "learning to live with ghosts in the upkeep, the conversation, the company or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts." His way of doing this work was to develop, even if he didn't define, a hauntology. And as we've seen, hauntology is a profoundly generative tool for diagnosing and deconstructing the theodician logic that structures in American religion of progress.
But as I conclude, I want to gesture toward a different approach, one informed by Derrida to be sure, but more influenced by Long himself. Because in that Black quotation, long gestures toward the very ethics, the very justice, quote, "without calculation and restitution," unquote, for which Derrida yearns. Long gestures towards that very ethics by turning our attention to those silent and silenced voices. Listen, he seems to be saying, they are still speaking.
If we are to be ethical or more just, if we are to find a way of relating differently, I believe we must sit-- we must follow Charles Long, which is to say I believe we must sit and stay with those who have been silenced. We need to dwell with those who appear only to disappear, which is to say, if any kind of radical justice is to be achieved, I believe we no longer-- I believe we need to no longer enact a theodicy of progress but, instead, a hauntodicy of Blackness.
It is time we stay with the dead, not merely as an act of mourning, but as an act of justice, an enactment that says we haven't moved on. I cannot fully tell you what that looks like, but as I'm one to do, I'd like to turn to Toni Morrison for answers. So at the end of Sula, one of the main characters, a woman named Nel has lost her best friend, the woman for whom the book is named. Nel has lost her best friend, whose name is, by the way, Sula.
Years after Sula has died, Nel finds herself struggling not to remember Sula, but to find solace. She doesn't, but she does find clarity. Walking away from the town drunk, the narrator tells us, quote, "suddenly, Nel stopped. her eye twitched and burned a little. Sula? She whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. Sula? Leaves stirred. Mud shifted.
There was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze." Quote, "all that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude. And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into his throat. We was girls together-- into her throat. We was girls together, she said, as though explaining something.
Oh, Lord, Sula, she cried. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. It was a fine cry, loud and long, but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. All that time, I thought I was missing Jude." I do not have time to elaborate on the details of this story, so what I would leave you is this. Feeling the presence of her long-dead friend, which is to say dwelling with the silenced, Nel finds clarity.
She realizes she was missing her best friend instead of a man the whole time. And according to Morrison herself, this clarity is the very evidence of goodness itself. Sometimes that goodness will look like a warm embrace. Other times, it might look like loud cries that have no bottoms or tops. I can't determine what this goodness, this justice without calculation will look like.
But as I recall Speaker Pelosi's speech, I can assure you what it doesn't look like. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Do I take questions? OK.
AUDIENCE: Dr. Gray, thank you for your lecture and really deep meditation. There's so much to kind of sit with and which you are calling us to do. And so I appreciate that. I guess I have a question-- maybe it's not a question. maybe you can just comment on this. I'm thinking about Joy James's-- I think it's 7 Lessons from an Abolitionist Notebook.
And one of those she says that organizers or the mothers of killed children make a request for justice to the state, one that says, resurrect the children that you've killed, which is a request that the state cannot attend to. And so if theodicy is anti-Black, if justice is anti-Black, what do we make of these demands to the state?
I think that that's kind of a question for consideration, especially as you've kind of spent time with the families of those slain. Yeah, what do we do with state power as a kind of extension of largely kind of crystal centric notions of the divine? Yeah.
And then lastly, I guess now, as I'm talking, the other piece of this is, thinking with Dolores William's warning about the salvific, especially as it relates to Black women, but I'm curious to hear you comment on that as a Black philosopher of Black religion, like, what does that do for your work, your project?
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I'll answer the second one first because it's a more straightforward, though not easy answer. I read Dolores Williams and William Jones as a kind of prophetic pairing at a particular moment in the history of Black religious studies. And the reason why I aligned with Jones-- and the reason why I align with Jones more is because I ironically read Joy James.
And so Joy James tells us that the efforts of survival actually prop up the brutality of the state. The womanist ideal of survival that Delores Williams is talking about that I absolutely-- her critique of atonement theory is yes, 1,000%. There's no way around it. I'm with or all the way down. I think where I struggle with is God is offering these resources for survival. And in so doing, God is in-- Williams, to her credit, she's honest about this, God is prompting Hagar to sort of prop up a certain structure.
She goes back. So I say that to say that's my response, is that I hear in William Jones, and also, I mean, there's also-- there's not just a small amount of wanting to, especially when we're talking about revering the dead and sitting with silence, we will always know-- I don't know. Our generation will always know about Dolores Williams. But with every passing generation, William Jones gets forgotten.
And so part of what I'm trying to do, part of what this project is attempting to do in some kind of way is to remind people that there was a Black humanist philosopher who called the Black theologians to the carpet in ways that they could not answer. And I think it is important-- I think it is important to-- I mean, yeah, they blackballed gim. I just want to-- revive is not the right word, but remember him.
I actually was feeling his presence as I was writing this piece. So yeah, that's the answer to the second one. The first one, it's funny. I was writing an earlier version of this, I'd already drafted this. There's like 10 drafts of this, so I've been thinking about this a lot. And one of the things that I decided-- I wanted to start too is be like, oh, I'm going to, like, the Center for the Study of World Religions. Don't the racial justice thing. Start with something more general. So I decided I was going to start with-- I thought I'm going to start with the book of Job. And I was like, all right. Eventually, I told myself, no, girl, it's not going to work.
But at the time, I was like, yeah, I'll start with the book of Job. And so, you know, I'm reading that text. And one of the things that he-- one of the things that we actually don't really think about, particularly coming up, at least where I came up in terms of Black churches, is if you don't the story of Job, it's a page turner for about 3 chapters, then it's not really a page turner for about 30-something chapters, and then it's another page turner for about 3 chapters, which is to say read the CliffsNotes version, the beginning and the end, right?
But long and the short, if you know the story of Job, he is Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, pick your mogul. But he's a good dude. He's not these guys. And so long and the short, God is like, yo, bro. Like, they have a bet. And there's a bet that goes down, and Job loses everything, everything, children, family, everything, except for his wife, who gets the shortest end of the stick I've ever seen in a biblical text. My point in all this is, at the end of this, in the long middle section, you know this, Job is like, God, I want an audience.
Give me justice. I need to hear you. Show up. You say you're just, show up, and God does as a tornado, as a whirlwind, as a destructive force. And what God offers Job in response-- and this is how I feel and this is not shading out the mothers when I say this-- what God offers in response is exactly what the state offers to people who survive folks who were killed by violence, which is a line of questioning to say, who are you to question me?
That's what God asked Job. Gird up your loins like a man, is what it says, which I find-- back in the day, there was wild stuff going on in the biblical text. People who know, they know. But gird up your loins like a man. And God asks, where were you when I created the world? And so I bring that up to say when Tamir Rice is fighting for something, the state reminds her, we make the rules here. Where were you when we built this country?
That doesn't matter. You understand what I'm saying? And so and I feel terrible for saying that because it is not on-- it is not on the mothers that this structure is what it is. But I think because of the way we read that biblical story, Job gets double for his trouble type of thing at the end, I think what we end up doing or I think reading that story in that way prompts us to do what Jones calls and to engage with what Jones calls a quietistic approach.
The state will continue. They do it every time. They do it every time. Chauvin is one of the most recent, the only-- and even then, justice isn't served because George Floyd isn't here. And so I say that to say the state just says every time, and not even just to people who were killed by cops in their families. The Supreme Court is about to do this in a few weeks, and I'll leave it there, I realize I'm being recorded right now, but you won't--
I mean, I hope I don't have to be explicit about that. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Co-teaching, of course, with Dr. Raymond Carr, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, named after James Cone's award-winning book called The Cross and the Lynching Tree where he reframes the Christian symbol of the cross and a rethinking of Christology. And I wanna quote you and ask you this question-- what would it mean to reframe the American Christian notion of the Trinity to be God, Jesus, and George Floyd?
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I'm of two minds about it. That's a hard one. I'm of two minds. So I'll just give you my first mind, if that's OK. It was God, Jesus, and-- I see exactly what you did there, and it's hard. If it's God, Jesus, and George Floyd, this means George Floyd would be sort of occupying a certain numotological role, right? Call it the Holy Spirit.
AUDIENCE: I said human experience.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: You say human experience? You know this better than me, so we'll let you-- no, no, no, no. I'm glad you corrected me. Because well, because what I was thinking about though, was, is this--
AUDIENCE: Floydian Numotology.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: OK, so this is what I was thinking about. So I'm thinking about the effects of a kind of Floydian Numotology. Like what does that mean? What would that call for?
And I think on the one hand, that is absolutely correct. Like, I think Floyd, if according to certain branches of-- you take me back to Divinity school days. But if the Holy Spirit is a kind of community sustainer or someone who brings community together, a force that does that, then it's undoubtable that George Floyd brought a certain kind of community together-- an American community together.
My fear with this-- if I can be honest with you about it, though-- like, my fear is that we don't treat him like that. This is hard to articulate. We don't valorize him like that. He's a trope. And so I'm-- that's what I'm struggling with, is the two sides of that.
There is something to be said about the fact that this man, in his death, provides community. And in the wake of his death, provides that. And not because he wants to, but there is something about that community force that I think is operative in a lot of folks who have been killed by cops. I think that's why he invokes. As I say, he's a ghost that brings other ghosts to the party.
But I think the other side of that is that-- I think what I'm concerned about-- this is not answering your question, but it's what I'm trying to respond-- The thing that I'm super like, uncertain about is, we don't treat him with that kind of-- the country doesn't treat him with that kind of respect, all right. So that's what I'm--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] is whether or not that other part of the Trinity [INAUDIBLE]
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yes. Yes, absolutely. No, you're absolutely correct. I mean, OK. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes. I have nothing to say except you are absolutely right. I mean, this happens in Black churches too, although we don't like to talk about it this way. But it is that the ancestral, the spiritual, the folks who are passed but not passed come back and stay with us. And we have dreams and we see them. And we feel them and we hear them. And we--
So I think that is absolutely correct. I think if we are thinking about something like a Black Trinity, I could see it. I think in terms of the structure of American religion, Yeah, I'm not quite sure. Yeah, that's-- Yeah, sorry.
OK, I don't know. I've got three hands. How do I do this? Do I-- Is that a hand in the back too? OK, so do I? Say we're going to go for you because I think you've got to roll anyway and then we're going to come back. I don't know. We'll figure this out.
AUDIENCE: Your comment dovetails into mine. So I just want to say one thing that I think of when I heard your question is it returns us from Holy Spirit and the Holy Ghost. And that's sort of interesting to me.
First, thank you. This is really rich. And I'm sort of out of my pocket here. But one thing I do spend a lot of time thinking about is time. And so I have a question for you because I think the invocation of the ontologicical and the hunto--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: The hunto--
AUDIENCE: Again, get that one out of my mouth hauntodicy.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yes.
AUDIENCE: As I hear this stands in really stark distinction or contradistinction to the Martin Luther King, the arc of history bends toward justice. And so maybe to be a succinct as possible, it raises a question for me for you in terms of your imagination or imaginary here. How does this sort translate into then how you think about the Christian understanding of time?
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yeah. I think this is the thing that I've been-- say more. Do you mean like eschatology, or do you mean like-- because what I'm thinking about when you say this is Christian theology-- not Christians. I mean, I named nobody's-- might get mad, right?
But Christian theology usually operates in a Theodician frame in a couple of ways, but one of the main ones is the eschatological. And this is and this is what essentially Jones sort of like disagrees with Cohen. This is why Jones is like, Cohen, I'm riding with you until-- because there is a certain point in which in the end things will work.
Romans 8:28, all things work together for the good of God. You know this. So how it reframes my understanding, if I go down the William Jones route and offer a kind of like Theodician stopgap for Christians, it is, one must-- and I've never said this in an academic frame-- academic framing. One must abandon the satiric logical and the eschatological. One must abandon an economy of salvation.
But that's not Christian anymore. So that's the difficulty with the whole situation is that. But in my mind, if we're talking time, and if we're talking temporality, Jesus gets up. George Floyd doesn't. Like, that difference-- hmm?
No, so what I'm struggling with is-- and because Jesus gets up, then that's the only way you get the sort of promise of the already not yet. So the temporal economy of salvation is almost always made possible by a promise that we have to wait for.
And William Jones keep saying everybody else done got they-- like, when will Black people get that? Look back. And I mean another ver-- I mean, so that's what-- it's not-- Christianity doesn't-- or Christian theology does not come out looking good as I frame it here.
What I will say with this crucifix on my chest is, but Jesus does. It sounds confessional, [LAUGHS] which is not what I want to do. But the theological doesn't come out looking good. But if Jesus was a racialized minority who was killed by cops, then we can draw from his ethical position to say, no, maybe there is no salvation as such, but there is a way that we can live, move, and have our being in the world that is reflective.
That, as Nel does with Sula, allows for us to remember. I was missing him all along, not whatever this. I know that's a really-- that's probably not anywhere near. But I--
AUDIENCE: Well, I think I hear there's a question of whether part of the problem is that what you can't save is something like a soteriology and the theology of history. But you can have a Jesus that's a haunting.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yes. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Which is a different--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: A staying with. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, the best of the Christian tradition takes us there, Howard Thurman. Those are the people that-- maybe he's not the best. He pretty good, though, right?
Howard Thurman is like one of the better ones. And I think it has a lot to do with he wants to be a follower of Jesus. He's less interested in the theological. Did you see what-- I mean, I don't know if I'm making--
AUDIENCE: Sure.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yeah, that's the-- so if there is soteriology, yeah, it is not connected to a theology of history. It is connected to a dwelling with the dead and their constant return. Do this in remembrance of me except that I'm here, right? So that's what I'm-- that's a way of responding.
Sorry, Charlie, I wad-- I'm trying to answer this because I'm thinking about the time thing. So yeah, sorry. Charlie, you can go ahead, and then I have hand in the back.
CHARLES STANG: [INAUDIBLE]
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Oh, OK.
CHARLES STANG: Maybe you should [INAUDIBLE].
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: OK. So we got a hand. Well, then we'll go, here and then we'll go in the back.
AUDIENCE: So thank you so much for this.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And I appreciate your hopeful possibility of the end. But I'm wondering if you think there is a possibility withing American Christianity-- that is to say white American Christianity-- for something that is just outside this way of-- it was Black death. It's huge.
Because I'm thinking about Willy James Jenny of this old notion that white American Christianity forms in and through white supremacy. So how did you create-- so I'm just trying to figure out how you get outside of that in order to not see Black death and just [INAUDIBLE] or not have the necessity other than that--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I don't think--
AUDIENCE: --as a [INAUDIBLE].
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: You're speaking about American Christianity more specifically, right? Not like the entire Christian tradition?
AUDIENCE: Yes. [INAUDIBLE] Something that I [INAUDIBLE].
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yeah, no. I don't think it's possible. If I can be frank with you, Charles Long's clear about this. The very structure of-- [STAMMERING] Tracy's gonna be mad because I'm forgetting this right now-- he calls it a sort of structure of concealment, that the United States, the very story that it tells about itself, about its founding, about its development, about its so on and so forth, is tethered to-- I mean, admittedly, the founders didn't know this-- but an admittedly Hegelian notion of progress.
And so what they're doing is they're saying we're getting better all the time. But that getting better always requires that Black and Indigenous people suffer and die. And so the United States-- and American religion, American Christianity, however you want to frame-- it is impossible, unless they-- unless the country decides, which it will never do, but decides to politically and discursive to say, we are not a country that is exceptional, we are not a country that gets better, we have not made progress.
Till the country gets to that point, we do not have the best justice system in the world. Until we do what somebody might call as a demythologization, there's no way. And this can be refracted through a conservative evangelical movement, the CRT folks. It can also be refracted through someone who is as well-meaning as Nancy Pelosi.
I don't be-- I'm not gonna be like, oh, Nancy Pelosi is a terrible person. I'm just saying to myself, she has no choice. She has to perpetuate the myth of American progress. And the only way you can do that, somebody gotta die for it to happen.
You can't-- there is no, oh, by the way. Progress just doesn't happen out the blue. It has to occur, which is why, for me, 2020 and 2014 are very similar to each other. This is not the first time we heard, "I can't breathe." But we needed the first "I can't breathe" for the second "I can't breathe" to resonate the way that it did.
But it resonates the same way to Black folks. But it doesn't matter to us because the country needed to resonate again. And so you have this six-year leap, and everybody is like, "I can't breathe." Like, we forgot about Eric Garner. He's in the room.
But that was only possible because the country thinks it got better when people put body cams on their chests in 2014. Do you see what I'm saying? The progress that came produced a repetition that then produced another law. Is this making-- I hope this is making--
AUDIENCE: Oh no, that makes sense.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: So with that mythical theological structure, there is no way, unless the country decides that it doesn't want to be progressive anymore. And even conservatives don't want that. They say they don't, but they don't. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, you [INAUDIBLE].
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I've said a lot. I'm sorry. It's just y'all got me excited. Y'all make me think I have said something worth saying. So yeah.
AUDIENCE: You have said something worth saying, something so intense and so real and so irrefutable that it feels silly to stutter into words at all. And yet what you're up to with the simulacra, specters, the ghosts, makes me want to ask, well, two things, that there's been this intensification of the spectral, spectacular power of the specter with the advent of television cameras, even body cams, videos, and now of the internet.
And I wonder if, given your very precise and keen reflections on the simulacra and the name, whether you've thought at all, or have any thoughts in relation to, how this has morphed since the advent and spread of television and screen fascination within the culture.
And then the other question is just that it does seem like something you are suggesting about ghosts and the haunting, or the listening with Charles Long into the depths of the silence, for not the specter but for the life, the presence, that comes back and visits me in the depths of night. And I get those prickles along the surface of my skin.
And someone is here. And that's not a specter in the sense you were speaking of earlier. And I just would love you to speak a bit more about that.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: That person who I feel right now is William Jones. But I don't know who you're feeling. I know who is with me right now. I appreciate him.
So that I don't cry, I will try to respond to the next one. One of my very, very-- I don't have a great answer because I'm not a media studies scholar. I'm just a philosopher of religion who reads Black studies.
So I think in a certain way-- and I'm being tongue in cheek, but I'm also being honest-- I do Black studies, and I do philosophy of religion. And my version of Black studies leans more toward the literary than it does the film studies, methodologically. So I don't have a great answer for you except-- I'll say two things in response, though.
The first thing that I'll say in terms of the simulacrities is even the videos are not real. And what I mean by that is not that it didn't happen. What I mean by that is that we can never access that moment. That moment can't even be accessed in the moment that it's being recorded.
There is no-- so that's what I would say is that looking at these videos are important. But also-- and this is the ethical part that I was trying to bring out. And that's why I use Nancy Pelosi. Because it was, quite frankly, easy. She gaffed.
But news outlets do this all the time-- trigger warning. We're about to show you something on a loop. And what do they do again and again and again and again and again and-- to the point where I assigned parts of my book that I was crying while I was writing to my undergraduates.
And they said, Dr. Gray, we really appreciate this. But we literally don't feel anything anymore. Does that make-- we've seen it too much. That screen flattens whatever that was out into something that is spectral. And so they don't have-- they can't do anything with it.
And so for me, that is as far as I'll go as a Black philosopher of religion and Black studies scholar. I will encourage you to be on the lookout for one of my best friend's works. I'm plugging her now. She is actively working on this work right now. Her name is Jessica Davenport. And she is thinking about photos and what they say and don't say.
And so she's working right now, doing her thing. And I just-- she and I have had some incredibly rich conversations about the false evidentiary status of a photo. She does not think-- and I'm going to stop spilling the tea because it's her work to do. So what I will say is that she is doing some powerful work on images and thinking about that question.
And so I will-- well, I'll send-- when the time comes, I'll definitely send a blast out or something like that so people can see. But thank you for the question. It is it is incredibly difficult. But yeah, thank you. I appreciate you, that question. Oh, you got a hand back there Dr. Carr.
RAYMOND CARR: Not at the time. But time is up. I can wait. We can talk in a minute.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: What you want to do?
CHARLES STANG: I had a feeling. it's 5:30.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I don't want to hold people hostage. I don't know. If people are--
CHARLES STANG: Maybe what we can do is--
AUDIENCE: Dr. Carr'd like to hear you--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Oh, OK, touché. [LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Well, first, let me apologize for making a self-vocalization vocal. I was saying an experience under my voice and it came out. Anyway, I just wanted to raise this question. You employed Charles Long and the signification of silence.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: You gonna get me right now.
AUDIENCE: Now, what Long does is he's using that text to critique categories.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Now, the question I want to ask you is, have you thought enough-- I think I'm hearing you do it at the end-- but have you thought to critique the category of theodicy? Because it's like Cornel West said. He said, these categories are sometimes not analytical categories. We have categories we analyze.
So my question becomes-- is when I hear you use the term theodicy, it's almost like there's one theodicy. And theodicy is plural-- there's no theodicies.
So my question is, [INAUDIBLE] I, as a theologian, hear you working within a particular framework that I think needs to be critiqued. And Long's signification of silence is the move that you can make to offer that critique. So want to put that question.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Yeah. Can you-- this is-- we're gonna do this over dinner. But I also want to just-- put a pin-- keeping what you were going to say in mind, just, I want to know what the other theodician possibilities are. So keep going.
AUDIENCE: Sometimes, some people would say that Black [INAUDIBLE], the reason why they are enslaved because they're Black, because they're the children of Ham. That's a theodicy. It's also a way to justify God.
But the theodicy that you're using is a function [INAUDIBLE]. You drew on [INAUDIBLE]. So we've coined the term. You bring this to Jones and you bring it to Pinn. And my problem that I have with Pinn and Jones-- less with Jones than [INAUDIBLE]--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Don't be hating on my man, now.
AUDIENCE: --is the way that they employ the idea of theodicy. I think that's why they're outside of Cone's project. Cone says that himself--
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: He does.
AUDIENCE: --in the footnotes about it.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I know. It's very brutal.
AUDIENCE: I think they're passing each other like ships in the night.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: I don't know if that's-- I don't think that's happening. But yeah, I don't think-- I think-- now, Pinn makes a methodological move that Jones doesn't. So we'll talk about that methodological move. What I will say in just sort of quick reply is Jones is forcing a question.
This is the difference between Jones-- this is one of the differences between Jones and Pinn. Pinn gives an answer. Jones doesn't. Jones says, you're telling me God is good, God is all powerful, God is a liberator. Show me. Prove to me. If you can refute this challenge of divine racism, you got it.
And so I think, for Jones, his project is not so much to say theodicy, that it's a prob-- well, it is to say it's a problem, but it is to say your very theological platforms-- this is why he calls it a preamble-- forces this question to be the first question. Explain to me why Black people keep on suffering. And yet God is still-- like, make it work. Make the math work.
And so that's where-- so I think with Jones-- this is why I love-- I also think he's a proto-Afropessimist, which is a whole nother thing. But my point in all this is that I think for him, I think for Jones, there's so much more sophistication going down, in part because he wants to do this as a Sartrian existentialist. He wants to ask the question. He's not a theologian.
And a lot of folks-- he's not. He's just trying to force a question. We gonna talk over dinner. Sorry, y'all. That was a lot. I get excited about this, clearly. I've held y'all too long, though, I think.
CHARLES STANG: Let's thank him.
[APPLAUSE]
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Thank you. It's fine. All right. I'm done, right? [INAUDIBLE]
CHARLES STANG: Hold on. Hang on a second.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Oh, oh, I don't know if I can--
CHARLES STANG: Just hang out right there for a second. Before we let you all go, I just want to make one announcement of an upcoming event. Professor Fadeke Castor, who's right here, on April 26 will be part of Nina's gnoseology series, speaking on multiple subjectivities and the ethnographic study of lived religion. So that's a Zoom event. Register, and tune in.
We don't have to leave a bit, so if any of you who have a burning question for this man and he's willing to field it, you have 15 minutes. Yes, Tracy?
AUDIENCE: Can Dr. Carr make an announcement?
CHARLES STANG: He may. Dr. Carr.
RAYMOND CARR: Yeah. I would love to invite you all to-- it's called The (Re)Imagination of Matter-- Introducing the Charles H. Long Papers Project. It'll be here next Friday. And we'll have [INAUDIBLE] Dr. [INAUDIBLE] will be involved. Dr, [INAUDIBLE], Charlie will be there, of course.
And we're going to talk about Long's papers and this project that I'm a part of. We'll also have the Emmy Award-winning actor Keith David. He's gonna read a piece from Dr. Long's work. So we'd love to have you.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Oh, yes. I'm mad I can't come, too. Set me up when I couldn't come. Heated about that.
CHARLES STANG: Thank you again, Dr. Gray.
BIKO MANDELA GRAY: Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Sponsor-- Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2023, president and fellows of Harvard College.