Memory, #BlackLivesMatter, and Theologians

The deaths of the young Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Andy Lopez, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones; the shootings by police of unarmed, uncharged, untried, and unconvicted black and brown men and women; and the martyrdom of nine black women and men in Charleston, South Carolina's Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church defy all intelligibility. The troubling circumstances of these and too many other deaths of black and brown human persons, the increased privatization of the U.S. prison industrial complex along with massive rates of incarceration, particularly, of black and brown men and women, the criminalization of poverty, the crude dissolution of labor unions, and our cruel responses to migrant, refugee, homeless, mentally ill, abused, differently-abled, paroled and released poor-white and -dark children, women, and men uncover the social "surd," the racial and racist irrationality within which we have come to live and move, think and feel, love and act, write and pray. Have we Christian theologians "reasoned away" those black bodies "piling up" throughout our nation through force and expropriation, coercion and cruelty? Have we forgotten the racialized, shattered, and lynched body that lies at the heart of our religious belief and practice?