See No Evil: Technology, Violence, and a Theology of Black Being

“Where we are faced with interminable grief of Black death amidst Christian theological claims that Black lives do not matter, it is clear that seeing is *not* believing, that bearing witness is not enough to challenge the chokehold of death. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones Boston College Contact Me

About this sabbatical grant for researchers

See No Evil is a monograph project that asks how seeing race is tied to racial belief, how anti-Blackness in the United States must not only be accounted for through technological advancement, but through theological admonition, and how the legacies of racial formation and white supremacy of the American Christian theological project is critical to a broader intervention in Black study. Many moral appeals to justice examine some form of what Christian theology describes as the imago Dei, the image of God carried in and through all flesh, a resonance that unifies humanity within a communal ethic and shared heritage, and demands justice and equity through the moral logics of a divine ethic. However, this Christian logic (at play for those who identify as Christians, but also subtending a certain vision of “American” ethos) has also been twisted toward the ends of defending white supremacy (and perhaps most readily seen in the Southern Baptist driven moral panic around Critical Race Theory). What is the image of God in the age of technological advancement? What challenges does technology present as a “third-party” means of how we image, how we imagine, of how we see race? How do we witness race (through the visual, the audible, the affective)? How does our ability to see, to witness death—and more specifically, Black death—also function as participation in others dying?