Biko Mandela Gray  The meaning of evil has undergone some pretty significant shifts over time. Early Christian theological conceptions of evil understood it as metaphysical in nature; for someone like St Augustine, existence itself was good, which tied goodness to the very state of being. In this formulation, evil was nothing other than the absence of goodness, which also meant that evil was the lack of existence itself. Evil was metaphysical in the sense that it had to do with the very nature of existence. This was extended through the mediaeval period with folks like Thomas Aquinas. Then in the 20th century, there was a massive shift in the post-war period, after Germany enacted a genocidal holocaust: the framing of evil as metaphysical privation started to fall away. Germany had been understood as the culmination of human progress throughout the history of philosophy – so what do you do when Germans carry out mass death on a scale never seen before? It forces us to ask questions differently – call it postmodernism – about the scope or the extent of human depravity. This becomes a new question of what evil is. I’m currently working on the writing of Sojourner Truth, a Black feminist abolitionist in the United States. It’s striking to me that in abolitionist literature they call slavery evil but the slaveholders do not see it as evil, and this is precisely at the moment when anti-Blackness became the standard of the day. You have three massive movements: the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the movement of chattel slavery, and the genocide that happened in the Second World War. And yet, the folks responsible for these things never claim that they themselves are evil. This poses a critical question as to how we might understand evil, because it’s no longer easily identified. It’s no longer readily understood.

Stephen C Finley  I want to make a distinction here between moral and natural evil, as some philosophers and theologians would make it. Natural evil is an earthquake or a hurricane that kills 100,000 people; what we’re largely talking about here is moral evil. However, that distinction isn’t all that clear today because a lot of what would be called natural evil in the 19th century is in the present an effect of human disregard for and exploitation of the environment.

BMG Yes, in the 19th and 18th centuries, natural evil and moral evil were two clear and distinct entities. Natural evil was something plainly out of the control of human hands. This is where insurance companies get their idea of an “act of God”. On the other hand, moral evil is absolutely within the realm of our abilities, and it turns out that we are some pretty shitty creatures. This is why, in part, Augustine developed the notion of original sin (that is, the idea that through Adam – and particularly through the act of sex between Adam and Eve after they sinned against God in the Garden of Eden – all humans are fundamentally sinful) in response to questions that have pervaded the Christian tradition for some time. The question though is what do you do in a 21st-century context, when the natural environment is being subjected to anthropocentric violence, when what was once natural evil is now properly understood to be moral evil?

SCF In my work on African American religion, the predominant focus is on this category of moral evil. Black people are constantly thinking about a world in which they are the objects of white racial terror. I enter this conversation largely through African American religion, and in particular, my work on the Nation of Islam, where they have a creation mythology that tries to explain the nature of evil, and in particular, why Black people suffer so much.

BMG In my study of Africana philosophy, or Black philosophy of religion, one of the things that we notice is Black folks are always understood as evil. We can see this in contemporary discourses on terrorism or conversations surrounding the political theology of enemies, and so on. But when we’re talking about evil, we’re talking about something that exceeds human reason, something that not only can be eliminated but which you are actively enjoined to destroy. Here in the United States, Marvel is a big deal, and in Avengers: Endgame (2019), it’s accepted that the bad guy Thanos needs to be murdered. No one questions the brutality that Captain America is carrying across the globe. No one raises questions about this blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan-looking motherfucker! The evil is Thanos. Now think about that in relation to Blackness in the United States. Black folks were once incredibly useful as enslaved people for their free labour. When we’re no longer useful in that way, people don’t know what to do with us and ultimately, new tropes emerge: while enslaved Black folks were overworked – often to death – which was an indicator of alleged utility, post-emancipation a new racial grammar was produced, wherein Black people would be deemed lazy and violent. And although the trope of hypersexuality had long pervaded ideas of Black people, eventually this trope would be taken to the extreme: their penises are too large; they will threaten the order of civilisation. And so we must contain and kill them.

SCF This is what Biko would call the theodicy of the West that, to me, begins with the slave trade and colonialism.* This is the racial logic of the West: even though there are other people of colour here who are colonised, and so on, the quintessential evil in the West is what Frantz Fanon would call “the Black”, by which he means the fear-inducing object of the white gaze. Fanon’s description of Blackness demonstrates how, for European-turned-white peoples, Black people are deemed threatening objects whose presence must either be constrained or eliminated.

* Coined by Gottfried Leibniz, “theodicy” refers to the attempt to resolve the problem of evil; namely, if God is omnibenevolent, why does evil exist?

BMG In the philosophy of religion, evil is a way to prove God’s existence, which is to say, “If God is so amazing, why do people suffer so much?” This query, as you can imagine, calls God’s existence into question; answering this query, then, is in and of itself, an attempt to prove and justify God’s existence as good and all-powerful. Philosophers and theologians have come up with a host of answers to this query that both preserve God’s existence and goodness while nevertheless denouncing evil. As with Augustine’s example, if sin is a privation of the good, then it’s not God’s goodness or existence that is in question, but this doesn’t mean that evil should be left alone. We should fight against it—and our very fight against it demonstrates our righteousness, which is to say, our alignment with God. So, when nation-states carry out violence, as Israel is in particular right now, it is part of a project to justify their own goodness, to show that they are on the right side of things. The theodicy here declares that the “democratic, open, multicultural” state of Israel is protecting democracy in the West. At the end of the day, those Palestinians, those Gazans, those Hamas members, are evil and therefore must be killed. Folks in the United States know this too well. Any police officer will say, “he reached into his waistband, she resisted arrest”, and that transports us to the realm of theodicy, because that person is evil and needs to be put down.

SCF Theodicy in the West is always a justification of Western goodness, and violence against bodies of colour – whether it be Palestinian, African or Native American – is always a justification or a reinscription of the goodness of white people.

BMG The sad reality here is that theodicy is an anti-Black enterprise, a white supremacist enterprise. Once you understand that, a lot of things begin to make a lot of sense.

SCF In my work, it’s hard to make that distinction. The Nation of Islam created an entire mythology to try to make sense of Black existence in the face of white racial terror over the 400 years of Black existence in the West, in particular in the United States. One of the ways that they tried to explain it was by collapsing that distinction: people commit evil because it is their nature to do so, because they were made in this creative genetic process called grafting. This is the reason why white people are so violent. The Nation of Islam and other Black religious groups in the United States have to recreate the cosmos through mythology in order to make white violence coherent, because otherwise it’s totally absurd. It’s true that white supremacist violence is anti-Black, first and foremost, but also anti-Asian, anti-Native American and anti-Latino, all of which shows up in the mythology of the Nation of Islam.* What is also true is that there’s no other community of people who export so much of this kind of violence. An explanation like this allows non-whites to live in the world, as challenging as that might still be. There isn’t a distinction there between the evil one commits, at least when it comes to Europeans and white people, and people being evil by nature.

* The Nation of Islam argues that Black people were the original earthly beings, descended from the Tribe of Shabazz and ruled by a series of mortal gods called Allah. Yakub, a scientist banished to the Greek island of Patmos for preaching dissension, began interbreeding the lightest-skinned figures in a process known as grafting. After hundreds of years of experiments, Yakub created a race of “white devils”, a violent people created to be without divinity or compassion, who overthrew the Tribe of Shabazz and achieved global dominance.

BMG What’s so striking to me is that it’s also true the other way around. You were getting at this from the perspective of the Nation of Islam, but when it comes to contemporary political and theological discourses on evil, what ultimately emerges is that, for particular populations, there is no distinction between the doing and the being. Let’s bring this down to a very basic level, one that I’m thinking about because Gaza is on my mind. Let’s take the idea of “Muslim” – which is to say a set of practices, a tradition, a set of rituals – as something one does. You do salah five times a day, you go to Jummah every Friday – I’m talking about Sunni Islam and not talking about the Nation of Islam, although they incorporate some of these practices. This is connected to the racialisation of Islam: whether one is part of the Nation of Islam or part of Sunni Islam, it is assumed that one is not white. This focus on embodiment produces the link between being and doing for non-white populations; if you pay attention to contemporary discourses in the West, non-white peoples’ practices are evidence of their inherently evil identities. What one does is evidence of who one is. 9/11 was a powerful expression of this discursive collapse: in the wake of 9/11, “Muslim” became a racialised identity, marked yes, by a certain set of ritual practices (including sartorial decisions like wearing a hijab), but also marked by certain violent actions. The line blurs: what a few people do becomes what a population of people are. This, of course, is not the case for Western (read: white) populations, though: because of the way the West functions, it produces this categorical distinction for itself, which is to say white folks are not evil but sometimes do evil things. That’s the distinction that holds until you deal with non-Western or non-white communities in the West, when the difference between doing and being falls apart. We’re seeing the same thing happen in Gaza, we’re seeing the same thing happen in Haiti. When Europeans encountered West Africans for the first time, they found people doing things very differently from Europeans. West Africans often had different spiritual pathways: their world was (and often still is) not marked by a sharp delineation between the sacred and the profane. These things that they did eventually became seen by Europeans as bad religion, which is to say, they became evil. Once it became evil to worship your ancestors, to venerate the people who have passed before you, it was a short step from that to this entire community of beings being coded as evildoers, who bring chaos where order should be.

SCF  Let’s think about that in terms of the US discourses on crime. Black people and people of colour, in general, don’t have the benefit of these complicated ecological explanations that explain certain criminal behaviour. Black people by their very nature are criminals, whereas white people commit crimes. All of this preserves white goodness, despite all the violence, colonialism, racism, genocide, and so on. Whiteness ultimately is good, and therefore it is always redeemable.

BMG Always. If we can go full circle for a second and go back to Augustine, he was responding to people who were asking, why is there violence, evil and suffering in the world? At that time, the faith system was Manichaeism. Manichaeism says that, on the one hand, God is the embodiment of all good, and the world is split between the two metaphysical realities of good and evil.* Because it’s split in this binary way, your job is to be on the right side of this binary, to be aligned with the side of good. Once the world is metaphysically split, all philosophical, political, socioeconomic and sociopolitical questions ultimately fall into these categories. It’s not simply that Finley and I are railing against white people. As a matter of fact, I’m not really interested in white people specifically, I’m interested in the epistemic object that is whiteness as a project that produces these categories of “good” and “evil”. Fanon is very clear that colonialism is a theodicy that justifies the goodness of the colonisers. “We brought democracy to you fuckers, we brought running water to you pieces of shit! We produced all of this civilisation for you all, so how dare you act as if you’re not the one on the wrong side of the divide?”

* As well as providing a dualist solution to the problem of evil, Manichaeism was a syncretic religion, incorporating deities and thought structures from other religions. Its namesake prophet, Mani, was the final prophet after Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus Christ.

SCF I don’t know that one can even cross that divide as a person of colour. You’re on the other side of this divide, this metaphysics of evil. I suppose that in very limited situations that evil can be bracketed, but it’s very precarious.

BMG There’s nothing that the colonised, the dark, the Black can do to escape the metaphysical divide. Once evil sticks to your being, everything you do is evil. It doesn’t matter what you do: you can be minding your business watching birds, but once evil has stuck, the game is over. You are subject to violence, if not death. Once evil sticks in this particular way, that’s the theodicy that in and of itself justifies the violence that happens. Why do you suffer? Because you’re evil.

SCF I wouldn’t be able to answer a question about true redemption because I’m not sure what that means. You hear narratives about the good and happy slaves, for example, that are always meant to protect whiteness from the charge of evil. I just wanted to say something about the term “holocaust”. When I hear “holocaust”, my response is always “Which one?” Long before the European holocaust, slavery and lynchings were called holocausts, and isolating the European holocaust is part of the logic that says that evil against Black people is not as significant. We don’t talk about Lothar von Trotha in Namibia, or Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa. Those aren’t holocausts. Leopold II was never a Hitler, but he killed 10 million Africans over rubber plants. Evil is different, if it’s evil at all, depending on who is the recipient of the violence.

BMG Redemption is a commodity that has been exported across the West. The reason why Leopold II isn’t understood as a Hitler-type figure is because the myth of redemption is something that can travel from nation-state to nation-state. Perhaps the best producer and exporter of the narrative of redemption is the United States. We may not have been the first, but we’ve done a really good job of saying, “Yeah, we murdered and murdered Indigenous folks, but we got them their own nations and reservations. We enslaved Black people, and did a lot of lynching too, but look at what we’ve been able to do to overcome. Martin Luther King had a dream.” When you look at Germany, particularly with the Shoah, what they’ve done is replicate a narrative of redemption and progress that we’ve seen elsewhere before. What Germany has done is to say “We did a bad thing. We acknowledge that we did a bad thing. But we did a bad thing.” Here, we get back to doing versus being. You have to keep in mind some of the thinkers that come out in Germany like Hegel and Heidegger are some horrible motherfuckers. It’s not just “we did a bad thing”: you think about Nietzsche’s deployment of the übermensch, and how this form of thinking is embedded in the intellectual and political climate of the country. The logic of redemption allows you to sidestep those developments, name the Shoah as something you did, and advocate as hard as possible to produce another colonial state, on top of a group of people who are already there, so that you can create a national narrative of redemption. We see this in the United States and Britain as well. All of this is not so much about individuals but national narratives that are required to stabilise a sense of patriotism. You need to know that your country isn’t as shitty as it might be. People don’t want to acknowledge this, but true redemption would take nothing less than the destruction of the world. We would have to burn down entire horizons of thinking and completely reconceptualise very basic ideas and terms.

SCF This is the most important point. This world can’t deliver what one might understand as true redemption. It just can’t do it.

BMG There are these foundational concepts that are either presumed or presumed to be good, that are entailed in a question like, “What is a human?” People say Palestinians are being dehumanised, Black people are being dehumanised, and my question always is, is the human something that we want to participate in? This is what I mean by the destruction of some of our epistemic foundations.

SCF Which should include the concept of civilisation, because it is a violent concept. It didn’t show up until the 1700s to describe France and England, but its grammar is embedded in everything across the West.

BMG Progress is another one: human, civilised progress. These three things we assume are either good or neutral, and they’re not. What if instead of being human we understood ourselves as mortals – as beings who can die? How might that shift our epistemic horizons? Nation-states are constantly producing largely white supremacist narratives in which Africa can never find redemption, no matter how many natural resources it produces for the world. The Democratic Republic of Congo is on fire right now, people are being displaced and murdered, and no one gives a shit because they need its cobalt.

SCF And they believe they have a right to take it!

BMG What does true redemption look like? I can’t really tell you. But I can tell you the first start is nothing less than the destruction not simply of the physical institutions but the epistemological structures. Steve Biko was clear about this, that’s why they murdered him. The greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. If I tell you your only political options are either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, we’ll stay trapped in this Manichaean dialectic of always good and always evil.

SCF When one says that we need a new world, even if it’s just a speech – let alone if you’re fighting for it – you’re always going to be a problem. In fact, you might even get cast as a terrorist.

BMG Tulsa, Oklahoma is a really good example of this. Them Black folks wasn’t bothered about what them white folks was doing, and then they came in and murdered them anyway. You don’t even have to be actively resisting. The Nation of Islam is another good example of this, as is the Five-Percent Nation, who were unbothered by whiteness, who just tried to create a new logic, and were institutionalised for being insane.* What I’m trying to say here is that I don’t think we are willing to pay the price for what true redemption would require, myself included. What we would have to do would be a global mass movement that completely destroys our epistemic, political, and quite frankly, theological horizons.

*Led by Clarence 13X (formerly Clarence Edward Smith) the Five-Percent Nation, also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE), was established in 1964 after Clarence split from the Nation of Islam. Teaching that Black people were the first people to inhabit the Earth, the movement emphasises self-knowledge and empowerment as a means to liberation, arguing that 85% of the population is unaware of the truth about existence, 10% knows the truth but hide it for their benefit, and the remaining 5% know the truth and strive to enlighten others. Their founder Clarence 13X was murdered in a still-formally-unsolved assassination and the FBI listed the movement as a gang in 1965, leading to the banning of NGE literature in penal institutions, a ban only lifted in 2003.

SCF  In other words, we have to give up this work.

BMG I love being a professor and I love teaching, but at the same time, the academy is a neoliberal institution. Even though we are in an apocalyptic situation, it’s the world we live in. Yet even as the world burns, we have modes of love and care that may not change the world, but are sustainable. Me and Finley are close: I care for him and he cares for me, and that matters. I hold on for dear life for the moments where I get to throw my hands around Finley’s neck. Those things sound hella petty, really small, but we have to find those moments of beautiful loving. We have to find those moments of holding and being held.

SCF That’s an important point to bring this to a close, with those small ways that we can love one another, that we can appreciate the world. I love purple flowers: I walk outside, I see purple flowers and it makes me smile. It doesn’t mean that the world is any better, or any good. Beyond that, I just try to do what I can for people to make their lives better.

BMG It’s bleak, but it is what we have. It is not enough, but it is what we have. I am grateful for that. I don’t want us to think of this as if there’s nothing that can be done. We can do things, and sometimes those things spark fires that create massive movements. So we can’t count ourselves out, but we can focus on these smaller-scale engagements and start from there.

SCF We have to. .