God Is a White Racist: Immanent Atheism as a Religious Response to Black Lives Matter and State-Sanctioned Anti-Black Violence

African Americans and their ancestors have been subjected to forms of violence premised upon the supremacy of the state as ultimate, immutable, transcendent. This supremacy usually manifests itself as an insidious, covert form of white supremacy coded as “law and order.” This article investigates the nature of white supremacy as state violence in the wake of the deaths of both Eric Garner and Mike Brown, arguing that the vindication of police officers is a form of theodicy, one that protects the divine state from charges of injustice and, more bluntly, evil. The response to this theodicean form of reasoning—a form that consistently subjects Black bodies to multiple forms of suffering and death and justifies that death by recourse to the power of this state—is atheism. This form of atheism is not a rejection of the traditional concept of God but rather an immanent atheism that rejects the transmutation of the state as divine and above reproach.