Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics by Vincent Lloyd and Andrew Prevot (review)

Much has changed since 2016, the year that the essays collected in Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics, edited by Vincent W. Lloyd and Andrew Prevot, were first presented at a Boston College symposium. And yet, so much has remained the same. For the scholars in this volume, the conditions which prompt—and which recursively are—the effects of anti-blackness are a part of that "changing same." These scholars present anti-blackness as an enduring crisis to ethics, to the formation of "ethical" persons, and to the project of making an ethical and just world. As such, this volume invites readers to stay with the crisis: anti-blackness, here, is an orienting term that repositions and recalibrates theo-ethical work in racial justice toward contemporary movements. Systemic and systematic anti-blackness affects all life, especially black(ened) life, across every vector. A serious grappling with anti-blackness (not just "racism," "white privilege," or "white supremacism,") requires one to dwell with distortions to the epistemological and ontological categories that it causes, and to the way these distorted categories and forms yield reality as we know it. Staying with this (de)formation encourages ethical undoing: the pain of awareness, the difficulty of conscientization, and the toil of reconstructed and reconstituted action. Yet the works in this volume provide accompaniment; readers will have touchstones while feeling their way around the darkness of anti-blackness.

The book is organized into three sections. First, "Black Loves" demands attentive re-thinking of that which we hold most dear. Bryan Massingale's analytic of sexual racism prompts us to think through the relation of racialization and sexuality. For him, to speak race is to simultaneously speak sex. Calling us to consider how black girls are subsumed into an anti-black matrix as always-already adult, Eboni Marshall Turman faces Toni Morrison's Pecola Breedlove in the effort to think the anti-blackness confronting her via an investigation of the erasure of black girlhood. Vincent Lloyd's essay on Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson causes us to think about the appearance of theological forms in black secular thought especially as black secular thought also articulates love. Such articulations may serve, Lloyd proffers, as a corrective to the over-representation of theologies of love by public theologians such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Black religious experience takes front seat in the section "Black Bodies and Selves." It nevertheless shows up ambivalently, appearing as a means for the shattering, recalibration, and reconstitution of the self (see the essays by Crawley and Prevot), and also as an obfuscation in which spirituality can be beholden to "abstractions sold to us by elites" and therefore in need of pairing with "natural loves" (149; essay by Lloyd). Further, we must note how black people see (and share) representations of lynched bodies, Elias Ortega-Aponte reminds us. Beyond a potential relation to survival, what are we to make of such sharing in a digital environment which operationalizes "neo-lynching spectacles" in its visual economy (124)?

"Theorizing Anti-blackness" demonstrates the varieties of histories and reading strategies one must engage in order to face anti-blackness without flinching. The essays by Kelly Brown Douglas, Santiago Slabodsky, Kelly Walker Grimes, and M. Shawn Copeland clarify the importance of knowing not only American racial history but also the particular histories which constitute black American enslavement, the historical trajectories of modernity/coloniality, and the history of African Americans.

Catholic and Protestant, queer- and straight-identifying, these essays reveal that battling anti-blackness requires a journey of body and spirit, a putting of the embodied self on the line as a target for undoing and unmaking of our anti-black socialization. The ethical mandate in this text is to learn to love again—to subject our wants, desires, longings, cross-making habits, and other racio-sexual arrangements to being undone by the brilliance of blackness. For Jackson and Cleaver, nothing less than the revolution was at stake. For those of us who...