Christopher Cameron - Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement

SERIES EDITORS

Brandon Byrd, Vanderbilt University

Zandria F. Robinson, Rhodes College

Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

BLACK LIVES MATTER. What began as a Twitter hashtag after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin has since become a widely recognized rallying cry for black being and resistance. The series aims are twofold: 1) to explore social justice and activism by black individuals and communities throughout history to the present, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the evolving ways it is being articulated and practiced across the African Diaspora; and 2) to examine everyday life and culture, rectifying well-worn histories that have excluded or denied the contributions of black individuals and communities or recast them as entirely white endeavors. Projects draw from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and will first and foremost be informed by peopled analyses, focusing on everyday actors and community folks.

Essays on a Moment and a Movement

Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright 2021 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First printing 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cameron, Christopher, 1983- editor. | Sinitiere, Phillip Luke, editor.

Title: Race, religion, and Black Lives Matter : essays on a moment and a movement / Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, eds.

Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021007082 (print) | LCCN 2021007083 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826502070 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826502063 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826502094 (epub) | ISBN 9780826502100 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Black lives matter movementReligious aspects. | African AmericansCivil rights. | African AmericansReligion. | Civil rightsReligious aspects. | Race relationsReligious aspects. | Religion and social problemsUnited States. | United StatesRace relations.

Classification: LCC E185.615 .R21325 2021 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook) | DDC 323.1196/073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007082

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007083

Contents

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Vanderbilt University Press director Gianna Mosser for supporting this project from the beginning and for shepherding its progress through a particularly challenging pandemic year. Her wisdom, insight, and good cheer improved this book. We appreciate her long-time support of both our scholarship and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). It is truly an honor to work together again. We are grateful to other Vanderbilt University Press staff who helped to bring this book to fruition: Joell Smith-Borne, Betsy Phillips, Jenna Phillips, Cynthia Yeager, and Brittany Johnson. We are also pleased that this book is part of the Black Lives and Liberation Series. Thanks also goes to the two anonymous readers; their suggestions helped to refine the books argument and strengthen the connections between and across the chapters. Finally, we are immensely grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many brilliant scholars whose chapters comprise this volume. Their excellent work has shed new light on understanding of BLM, its history, and its ongoing significance.

Introduction

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in 2013 when a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martins murder. Yet the movement symbolizes far more than the moment of Martins death. It signals a new moment of opposition and insurgency against white supremacys intended goal of disciplining blackness and Black people. Perhaps ironically, BLM emerged against the backdrop of the Obama era, during the tenure of African American attorney general Eric Holder, and in the midst of a vast expansion of the surveillance state, a long-standing tool of anti-Black repression. The early twenty-first centurys saturation with neoliberalism often renders even some purportedly progressive people and/or movements resolutely complicit in structures of exploitation, extraction, and violence. Given such realities, BLM demands recognition of the dignity of Black life while it mobilizes protest for policy change, including the reorganization of resources for a more just and equitable world. It requires the apprehension of police brutality and insists on justice for state actors who perpetuate, fund, and support anti-Black violence.

BLMs genesis as a hashtag by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi marks the historical moment of its creation as an organization and as a movement in the digital era. At the same time, BLM has deep roots in struggles for Black liberation and in one regard extends the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. BLM, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like All night! All day! Were gonna fight for Freddie Gray! and No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here! give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustains BLM. If BLMs contemporary presence connects politically to earlier eras of Black liberation struggles, then it follows that religion is a key variable in the movements overall work and history.

BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected. Yet, contrary to general perceptions, religion has been neither absent nor excluded from the movements activities. For example, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors practices a West African Yoruba religious tradition known as Ifa. She has found in the traditions spirituality a source of existential strength in Black freedom work. When you are working with people who have been directly impacted by state violence and heavy policing in our communities, she states, it is really important that there is a connection to the spirit world. Drawing a connection between religious ideas and religious practice in the context of activism and cultural production, she said, Peoples resilience, I think, is tied to their will to live, our will to survive, which is deeply spiritual.... I dont believe spirit is this thing that lives outside of us dictating our lives, but rather our ability to be deeply connected to something that is bigger than us. I think that is what makes our work powerful. Tometi, Garza, and Cullorss comments show that BLM is not a wholly secular movement; aspects of institutional religion and faith commitments commingle with spiritual practices of material experiences. This suggests that scholars of history, politics, race, society, and culture should explore critically and analytically the place of religion in BLM-era activism.