The sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural climate in the United States today is marked by a narrowed scope of justice and partisan polarization. Public policy debates and executive orders are driven by assumptions that describe certain social groups (domestic and international) as pathological, deviant and/or even terroristic. By labeling some groups in such terms, the members of these groups are rendered expendable to social, political, and economic life as well as moral community, thus they are left outside the scope of justice.

In Black Queer Ethics, Thelathia Nikki Young re-centers eloquently one such group, black queer people, among debates about family values, gay marriage and most recently the accommodations for transgendered persons. Most importantly, though, Young does not let any of these public policy debates drive her argument. Instead, her argument compels us to think deeply about family as both a site of oppression and source of creative resistance for the sake of our collective moral flourishing. Young’s explication of family as understood and practiced by black queer people offers a vision of moral flourishing that can sustain all of us. Indeed, Young does not retrieve ethical insights about family from her interviews with black queer people and romanticize them. Any queer utopic moral vision is grounded in an imperative to create micro-communities. Accordingly, my comments in this response to her book inquire about two other social institutions that are implicated in her argument about family.

Some might say that there is a trinity of interdependent social institutions—family, education, religion/church—of norm formation and stabilization. Schools, like families, are sites where identities and systems intersect with profound effect on individuals, social groups, and society overall. The race, ethnicity, gender, class, physical and mental ability, English language facility, and immigration status of individual students effect how and what they are taught, as well as influence public education policy. The Secretary of Education Betty DeVos speaks about reframing the public education paradigm to emphasize parental choice, the needs of the individual child, and greater local rather than federal control of schools and state education policy.1 There is an undercurrent of de facto privatization of public education at the heart of this paradigm shift. As Donald Cohen, analyst of current trends in public education, reminds us: “People tend to think privatization is about giving it to the private sector, or a private corporation…. But privatizing is more than that. It’s when there is less public control, fewer regulations, and more governance by market forces.”2

Let’s imagine public schools can become micro-communities “in which people exist in fully intentional relationality and where human potentiality is not based on individualism, but rather on relationships with one another” (161). A few questions: What kind of curriculum will be taught? How will micro-communities differ in practice from unjust segregated institutions? How shall we truly disrupt the separate but equal binary that continues to plague public education driven equally by current race-ethnicity, economic, and political dynamics?

I think that Young’s argument sets us on a quest for ways and means to destabilize and counter-normalize systems and policies. Accordingly, “subversive-generative moral imagination” amid current heightened partisan polarization is critical. This imagination raises important questions about the limits of current political protest as well as possibilities for such. The limits of current protest from this perspective have to do with the degree to which it disrupts fully even progressive norms. Too often we are prepared to disrupt conservative norms but fail to acknowledge the equally problematic stabilizing functions of progressive norms. When progressives fail to acknowledge the stabilizing function of all norms, they inhibit the full potential of protest. Surely protest is precisely a form of “disruption [that] makes room for the irruption of new counter-normalizing norms that are themselves examples of new possibilities” (103). Moreover, public policy is about the distribution of social, political and economic resources of society; thus, protest as disruption-irruption deriving is critical for an ever-expanding scope of justice that is crucial to how we live as moral community. In fact, Pew Research indicates that partisan polarization is more acrimonious than it has been in nearly a quarter century, aimed at members of the opposing parties’ policies and personal lives.3 Perhaps, the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties and the current fusion coalitions or Black Lives Matter movement are examples of disruption-irruption protest. Still, on issues such as gay marriage, accommodations for transgendered persons, abortion, gun violence, and health care, as a country we remain embroiled in partisan polarization not only on the lines of public protest but also in the legislative sphere of policy-making. There seems to be an overriding us vs. them binary yet to be truly disrupted.

Queer relationality is the creative-generative norm for moral agency that is policy-oriented and engenders moral community. Young proposes the following ethical frameworks for queer relationality: mutuality and justice-love. The earmarks of these ethical frameworks are right relations of embodied vulnerability and relationships of accountability. Her explication of these frameworks leads us to the third social institution implicated in her discussion of family—religion/church. Young notes that these ethical frameworks displace a traditional Christian ethical emphasis on self-sacrifice and replace it with an emphasis on liberative right relatedness. Who is my neighbor? Who is family? The answer to these two questions from the perspective of queer relationality reveals the subversive power of justice-love: “It makes us recognize that being fully free selves means that we are able to love and love justly. It means that our liberty necessitates our accountability and becoming free together means being family” (181).

When we think about religion/church from the perspective of black queer morality and family, it seems that most mainstream/mainline white Christian churches have not embraced fully the subversive power of justice-love. Many denominational churches continue to debate and threaten schism regarding the ordination and election of gay persons to the clergy and episcopacy. Likewise, most historic denominational black churches fail to acknowledge the stories of black queer people and to embrace the morality that emerges from those stories. Young’s closing lines incriminate these black churches: “Doing the ethical work of excavating stories and privileging diverse subjectivities demonstrates, once and for all, that black lives matter” (198). A final question: Can the binaries of orthodoxy be disrupted?

Thelathia Nikki Young provides us with a roadmap to a new black and queer ethics that opens different ways of looking at relationships. I was particularly moved by how her conversations with black queer people in Atlanta shaped the narrative; it’s in these stories and dialogues she (and we) find real insights about shaping a future that looks very different from the past.

Moved as I was by all these stories, I got stopped in my tracks by her interaction with Sage, who explained how she saw the difference between family and friends. For Sage, family is where she gives more, goes “to the limit” or even beyond it. Friends, on the other hand, she sets boundaries with. Sage goes on to explain that society uses capitalism and biology to define what family is, and she’d like to get beyond that definition, to expand with whom she, as L. Alice terms it, “stays down.” Young uses these stories and perspectives to broaden the criteria for people to count as family. Family, then, consists of those people with whom one stays down. Family values are how we manifest this staying down: through loyalty, interdependence, unconditional commitment, and a shared history. We queer kinship, she suggests, by redefining family through values rather than economics and biology. Kinship is thus based on choice and family is something entirely other than what it has been.

For blacks and queers, this is most liberating. As the heteropatriarchal white family (extended and nuclear) has been privileged by law and custom throughout American history, demanding to have our different family configurations recognized and valued has been a significant part of black and queer efforts for self-validation and respect over the last half century. We question the sacredness of families built on biology and defined through economic measures like marriage and inheritance, and mock the valorization of the man-wife-boy-girl-dog nuclear family. When we seek to validate families we choose rather than those we are given (or, in the case of the enslaved, not even permitted to have) we defy efforts to deny our humanity. We celebrate the validity of our various nontraditional family formations. We redefine “family values.” And we should. But is that enough? Maybe we need to get beyond “family” if we want to rethink how we value these intimate connections.

Here I return to Sage who draws family on one side of a boundary and leaves friends on the other. While her new understanding of family might also incorporate some of her friends, this redefinition of family (and the insistence on taking back the term), while important, still affirms that distinction. It’s one that troubles me. In taking back family, we are leaving other relationships outside the charmed circle, and leaving this relationship hierarchy in place limits new ways of thinking about how we might (and do) organize our lives queerly.

So, then, a series of questions:

How do we (and why should we) privilege family over friends? Doesn’t friendship have the potential to satisfy Young’s family values criteria of loyalty, interdependence, unconditional commitment, and a shared history? What makes someone decide when a friend is actually family? Why should they have to? Why can’t friendships be recognized for what they are and what they bring to our lives? Why ask the question “how do you distinguish between family and friend” at all? In my life, some of my best friends are people in my “family”—my wife (oh I do hate that term, but it’s a great way of coming out, and not using it in the era of gay marriage only serves to obfuscate one’s sexual identity), my son and daughter, my ex-husband’s first cousin: these are my friends, and I value their friendship above all.

And as to my “non-familial” friends: there’s still some notion in the lesbian world that my friend who is my ex-lover is more “family” than my very close friends with whom I never shared a sexual relationship. That feels quite arbitrary to me, since some of my ex-lovers are hardly family any more at all. (And maybe they never were.) And many of my friends have stayed down with me in the thickest of ways.

That leads me ask how sex (and reproductivity for that matter) matter in the way we define others as family. Young tells us that marriage should not be the basis for defining family, but can we say the bonds made by sex (and reproduction) don’t define family? If we use the term family to measure who’s in our intimate networks, how do our bio-legal relatives fit? I have little contact with my family of origin. My parents have both been dead for about thirty years, as have their siblings. I do stay in touch with a few bio-cousins, but count my ex-husband’s and current wife’s bio-legal relatives as my real family, which technically by American standards they are. I don’t like all of them, but I do like that they are in my life. Whether or not they are the ones who stay down with me however is a matter of life’s vagaries (some do; it’s often surprising which ones), but I want them all to count whether I like them or not. So I’m not ready to give up on legal/biological connections just yet.

So then, beyond friends and family, what about all those others who form circles of intimacy? Shouldn’t my coworkers, with whom I spend a good deal of my time and who often have my back count too? (This would also be true for those people who are for whatever reason institutionalized.) And my friends who love their animal companions will want to remind me that those relationships should not be trivialized as they are when we mock the nuclear family’s dog; for many they may be the most intimate and closest relationships of all. And while I don’t do social networks, I would also suggest that many people rely on their Facebook friends for more than just amusement; they are often a lifeline and one other way to configure who matters, who cares for them, and whom they care for.

Circles of intimacy (or maybe families in the plural, or even stay downers) make more sense to me as possible ways to reconfigure the limited bio/legal/economic notion of family than to try to co-opt the term itself. I’m most grateful to Young for creating the opportunity to think about why that’s a boundary I want to push.

When I started this book the chorus of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” rang through my consciousness with each page I turned. The 1979 hit “We Are Family” was recently added to the National Recording Registry in January 2017 by the Library of Congress as a song that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” to American society.1 In my favorite verse, Sister Sledge sings,

Living life is fun and we’ve just begun

To get our share of this world’s delights

High, high hopes we have for the future

And our goals in sight

We, no we don’t get depressed

Here’s what we call our golden rule

Have faith in you and the things you do

We are Family

I got all my sisters with me

Get up everybody and sing

The lyrics present a number of family options and offer an optimistic view of family that I immediately saw mirrored in Thelathia Nikki Young’s brilliant deconstruction and reinvention of family in the pages of Black Queer Ethics, Family, & Philosophical Imagination. Young presents a sense of family that extends past the boundaries of DNA, marriage, or communal living that offers transformative possibilities for what it means to remember and recreate the construct of family. In her book’s thesis, she argues that “black queer people are moral agents who enact family in ways that are simultaneously disruptive to current familial norms in our society, creatively resistant to the disciplinary powers at work in these norms, and subversively generative and imaginative in relation to establishing new ways of being in relationship” (10). Thus, at its very core, the work is concerned with disturbing and envisioning understandings of family demonstrating a keen sense of the values, virtues, and norms involved with black queer relationality.

Young situates her argument as a black queer Christian ethicist, and as a womanist sexual ethicist I too share her interest in values, virtues, and norms.

By destabilizing the seemingly stable and yet constantly volatile notion of family, rather than recreating the dichotomy of families of origin and chosen families, Young actually provides a window into the murkiness of multiple conceptions of family while being attentive to what norms should not be recreated as black queer communities reconstitute their familial ties in innovative ways. Chapter 4 presents interviewee Denise’s discussion of family obligation that centers on materialism. Denise is relieved to be able to be “give out of love” to her “created family” as opposed to obligation or guilt (88–89). This is striking because it intimates that there is still the possibility of a reciprocal or even mandated duty to those we call family but the difference is that a person can choose to reciprocate or give. Because this is discussed in a chapter focused on norms, it pushed me to ponder the plausibility of creating family that is interdependent yet not mandatory. As I try to think beyond current heteronormative familial structures, I am still struck with how much of the human condition is in fact conditional. From the gestation period to the interment process, we depend on others, for some this is ideally those we call family. Yet, can this be discussed outside of the norm of the exploitative nature of capitalist economic family structures discussed in chapter 5? Is Denise’s ability to choose enough to make participation and replication of capitalism palatable?

These questions bring me back to the true murkiness of the family visions that Young provides. There are no model exemplars, simply endless reimaginings of different ways of being with each other in the world. Yet, each new possibility presented new doors into potentially different structures than even what Young describes. For instance, when discussing black queer rejection of heteronormative family structures Young includes an interview excerpt from Gabrielle who shared her interest in open and polygamist relationships. Young also describes the triad relationship of Park, Vicci, and Jackie who are co-parenting Young’s god-son Kenyan. Young lifts these examples of the queer imaginings of family but also includes them in discussions of loyalty and solidarity. The richness of the narratives pushed me to imaginative spaces of my own, spaces where persons are free to consciously uncouple from monogamy, parenting, or even codependency and still be “in the family” and not just absentee. For me, these spaces illustrate Alice Walker’s womanist definition of being a separatist for health reasons while still being committed to the survival and wholeness of the entire people.

There are examples of separatism for personal health given throughout the text, and they are highlighted as examples of the virtues of survival and resilience within black queer subjectivity. I truly appreciated that Black Queer Ethics provides narratives of unjust families without normalizing or essentializing these experiences as indicative of all black queer identity. As a womanist sexual ethicist, I constantly push to have the discourse move beyond merely remembering the pain done to the bodies of black women as I anxiously want to create space for discussions of sexual pleasure felt within black bodies. Similarly by remembering that there are some family structures that should be torn down, Young does not dwell on the negative but instead focuses on the positive depictions of family that are being created and that will ultimately transform the concept of family.

Even if one starts with the negation of hierarchical familial households Young promises the possibility of the good life or a new ethical standard for relationships so the reader is taken to the positive (121). This is a creative enterprise that posits a new type of family values that makes real realities of wholeness and hope. Young innovatively draws on Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum to present the black queer good life. Yet, I immediately found similarities to ethicist Peter Paris’s work Virtues and Values: The African and African American Experience. Paris claims that African American virtues are oriented towards preserving and promoting community, a concept he considered justice and the supreme virtue. At its core I conjecture that pursuing and creating the good life that indicates our accountability and responsibility to others, is perhaps the highest virtue for Young. Thriving families live outside of the land of imagination and become actual, and the various narratives Young gathers show this in our real world.

Moral imagination offers the gift of our actual stories while acknowledging that so much more is possible than what we have experienced. Young asks her readers “if we could imagine relationships that do, in fact, dismiss or dismantle the ‘system of power’ within relationships altogether” (180). While the narratives she provides show variations of how power, gender, capitalism, race, and sexuality are explored they all are still working within known power systems. Yet, the good life offers more than we know. With every individual daring to live and love in their best way, our imaginations expand and make room for even more expansive interpretations of relationality. This promises a space where, as Sister Sledge sings, “everyone can see we’re together” because “we are family.”

“I mean ‘queer’ to me in itself embraces a radical politics . . . [;] it connects me to people. It opens a space up in me that allows me to see that space in other people” (89). These words from Bayard, one of the interviewed participants, featured in Thelathia Nikki Young’s Black Queer Ethics, Family, & Philosophical Imagination (2016) call to mind the power of black queer experiences and a concept of marginality espoused by Victor Turner. Turner spoke eloquently in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) about the ethical bounty held within the liminal space.1 The liminal space is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”2 Such space is “ambiguous and indeterminate” yet full of potentiality, likened to “death, to being in the womb, . . . [or] to the wilderness.”3 Liminality comprises egalitarianism, serenity despite chaos, and freedom from the hegemonic forces that seek to control what is and what can be; it is permeated by an eminence and belief in futurity, revealing its transitory yet cyclical nature.4 Since encountering this idea, I have found myself wistfully in search of an embrace of liminality; spaces that can make permanent the seemingly ephemeral and welcome the uncertainty of ambiguity, courageously creating comfort amidst disorientation and accessing hope in an otherwise. Young’s Black Queer Ethics gifts us with the otherwise that we have been hoping for, the beautiful and complex mess that is a non-normative life lived in resistance: the anti-structure.

Young and Sage, another participant, introduce a “jazz mode of creativity,” which I believe is an expression of this liminality (32). This jazz mode of creativity calls forth a resilience in its innovation and adaptability, and jazz after all is an extension of Afro-diasporic communication.5 Amiri Baraka notes that “the most apparent survivals of African music” are in the rhythms of African American music.6 Baraka offers a solid foundation for understanding jazz, saying that “the very structure of jazz is the melodic statement with . . . improvised answers or comments on the initial theme.”7 Baraka’s definition parallels the comments from Ashley, another participant, who affirms that “family is something . . . [you can create.] I love that it can change, that you can generate things differently than you ever thought of before, that anything is possible” (100). Ashley recalls that she “come[s] from queer ancestors” and the ways in which the always already non-normative nature of black queerness establishes a “creative, generative process” (100). Sage, however, draws us back to the brilliance that it takes to survive, recognizing that “being black and queer is a gift—a gift of vision” (32).

Sage finds that black queers have “access to possibilities, choices, and the knowledge of choices . . . [and] can search the depths of consciousness and the expansiveness of all creation to make some really good stuff” (32). This constant exploration arises because “there in is no model or norm” and, therefore, requires an embrace of spontaneity, both of which are at the core of jazz (32). John Coltrane noted that when soloing “I start from one point and go as far as possible [though I hope to] lose my way . . . [because] what would interest me greatly is to discover paths that I’m perhaps not aware of.”8 Coltrane reaches ceaselessly, relying on his own capacity and the endless possibilities, longing for the opportunity for innovation, or the space to build one’s ethical road as one goes. Miles Davis discussed forward movement and hopefulness in jazz, saying “it’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.’”9 Such hopefulness requires self-forgiveness and compassion to assuage regret or self-denigration and point towards the disruption to which Young lays claim; “disruption makes room for the irruption of new-counter normalizing norms” and helps us recognize the pervasive normalization of hegemonic structures (103). Young reminds us that the abject nature of black queer bodies and realities leaves room for exploration and possibility, allowing black queer flourishing. Disruption also encourages a “bearing up” of one another that Harriet T., another participant, describes.

To bear up, or to hold “the weight of individual and collective experience, insights and longings[,] . . . [yields a communicative honesty that] call[s] the family to reflect constructively with one another” (101). An unparalleled freedom emerges when sharing experiences; a freedom that subverts hegemonic expectations for black queer individuals like Bayard, who boldly asserts that Jesus sought to “escape a biological determinism when it came to ethics and how we should treat one another” (89). For Bayard, freedom comes in a restructuring of his canon that does not rule out constructions of family that love and care him into life. For Denise, another participant, freedom enables you to do “whatever the hell you wanna do and [know] everybody just gon’ accept you” (133). John Coltrane echoes this sentiment when talking about longtime pianist McCoy Tyner, saying, “Tyner keeps himself to the harmonies, which lets me forget them. [It] kind of gives me wings and lets me leave the earth from time to time.”10 This “bearing up” is created in black queer families, yet also remains malleable, shifting as the family and its needs stretch and making different kinds of freedom opportune. I believe such freedom is visible in Young’s methodology as well. Young does not simply offer an ethical guide that uncovers the ethical bounty of black queer existence, but does so ethically.

Young disrupts the fragmented societal understanding of black queerness and offers us an opportunity to receive the vast potentialities named and unnamed of black queer life. Towards the beginning of the text, Young discusses Emmanuel Lartey, who “names the space of listening ‘holy’ because it is the locus in which attention meets intimacy” (39); I find Young’s approach to this text and community holy, then. Jazz pianist Sun Ra, in the song “Enlightenment,” sings of “the magic light of tomorrow” and proclaims that “enlightenment is my tomorrow . . . hereby, my invitation / I do invite you be of my space world.”11 Young’s work is the presentation of a possible tomorrow towards which black queer experience gestures replete with light, joy, and promise, which are precluded from black queer existence as it is alien to the bounds of enjoyment privileged by hegemony; moreover, it is a simultaneous invitation for participation. Young asks us to join her as she interacts with interviewees, disrupting the process itself and drawing us into intimate exchange with black queer experience (129). She presents this exchange in part by creating space for “black queer voices [to] self-name through narrative in [her] book,” sharing the voices and stories of participants unencumbered, thereby reaffirming their agency (37). She places participants into conversation with one another, like Benito and Denise, reasserting the communal nature of conversation around family and black queer life (86–87). Perhaps more poignantly, Young revels in the magic and power of black queer life as she writes. There is profound joy as she contends that “black queers engage in imagination . . . ‘perform[ing]’ a type of world viewing that is essentially and discursively radical, critical, and transformational” (158). Sun Ra is known to have said “the possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.”12 Young honors that which has been tried and builds upon it, while uncovering the impossible; more accurately, the black queer possibilities and moral imagination relegated to impossibility. Like Sun Ra, Young reveals to us an ethic of afrofuturity; one that simultaneously transcends time and space through a reconstitution of the liminal. This now and not-yet that Young describes “allows for moral agents to occupy spaces that are projections [of] future possibilities” and is the key to black queer survival (161). As in any understanding of the liminal, black queer space is enigmatic and somewhat indeterminate, melding present with future while holding fast to its ancestral roots. This space establishes an egalitarianism while using spontaneity to embody the divine creation of generative love as a response to the ambiguity (or the incomprehensibility of black queer life in a white cisheteropatriarchal hegemony), reaffirming the possibility for black queer flourishing. I am hopeful for the now and not-yet and grateful that Young blessed us with a written record and guidance to what we can imagine is only the precipice of the “impossible.”

BLACK. QUEER. ETHICS. With just the first three words of the title to her wonderful first book, Black Queer Ethics, Family and Philosophical Imagination, Thelathia Nikki Young has made quite a significant intervention. In thinking across, and bringing together, these categories—the black, the queer, the ethical—with both academic rigor and personal vulnerability, Black Queer Ethics is noteworthy.

Throughout the book, Young boldly locates herself in the story (i.e., in the first person), moving between textual analysis and ethnographic-like interviews. In this vein, she positions her analysis within traditions of feminist anthropology and, as I read it, black Christian practices of testimony. In the play between Christian and queer, ethics and ethnography, scripture and storytelling, all in the context of black life, Black Queer Ethics charts a bold path for future scholarship. Given the author’s methodological commitment to “Praxis”—of ethics as a “theoretical and practical endeavor”—my response tries to follow Young’s lead by attending to the pull between theory and practice and to highlight and suggest synergies between the book and broader developments in the worlds of academia and activism.

At the level of activism, the recent prominence of #BlackLivesMatter has provided the phrase “Black Queer” with a degree of accessibility, as many of the movement’s most visible figures self-identify as queer and/or espouse a black queer (and feminist) politics. Within academic circles, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson’s 2004 volume, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, garnered a broad interdisciplinary hearing for Black Queer Studies. Contributors to this volume helped set an agenda for more specific studies of the varying experiences and phenomena that fall under rubrics of black queer subjectivity and social life that have since been published. As but one recent example, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (2016), edited by E. Patrick Johnson—which bills itself as a “follow up” to his and Henderson’s earlier anthology—served notice of a field finding form and fullness even as it modeled a form of black queer collaboration and community.

In the context of this burgeoning field of Black Queer Studies noted above, the simple addition of “ethics” is what seems to make Young’s work especially novel. To Google “black queer ethics” (or to look up the phrase with academic search engines) is to find references almost exclusively to Young’s work. To be clear, as Young herself notes, there is a community of scholars working at the intersections of black queer theory (and LGBT studies) and theology and ethics. Nor is there is any absence of consideration for various topics that fall under the umbrella of ethics, in a general sense, within the various fields that comprise black queer studies. If not immediately obvious, the third word in Young’s title—namely, ethics—does offer a clue to the book’s singularity.

With Black Queer Ethics, Young is one of the first scholars (if not the first) to offer a book-length inquiry into black queer life from within the specific field of Christian ethics. In writing this book, Young’s aim is not simply to place Christian ethics in conversation with Black Queer Studies. Rather, she appeals to black queer life as a means of holding the discipline in which she was trained accountable to its professed ethical (and Christian) commitments. To do so, Young gives due attention to the history and discursive structures of Christian ethics, which she renders with nuance as a hegemonic discourse that simultaneously aspires to liberationist ideals. Here she is less concerned with imposing a systematic Christian ethic onto black queer life. Nor is her goal to render black queer life in Christian terms, or even with making a Christian claim for black queer identity.

Rightfully, to my mind, rather than an act of apologetics, Young offers a portrait of “Black Queers” (to use her phrase) engaging the Bible (and other sources), attending churches (or not), and attempting to practice their faith (and negotiate doubts) on a day-to-day basis. Whereas popular storylines and academic orthodoxies often accept the proposition of the Christian and the Queer as a relationship of fundamental oppositions, Young presents the stories of Black Queers (herself included) who find themselves in varied relationship to Christianity. Black, Queer and Christian are entangled in ways that don’t neatly line up with creeds and doctrinal statements.

I find this approach—indicative, I think, of an ethic that privileges black queer living and doing over Christian orthodoxy—compelling in that it is consistent with what I’ve come to think of as the rather “heterodox history of Afro-Protestantism.” Which is to say, we can think of black faith as a queer tradition comprised of a range of ideas and practices that don’t always register on the official records of religious institutions or academic studies. Yet I also found myself wondering (and so I ask): what does Young think about what might be observed as the absence of Christianity in black queer studies? Or, perhaps, where and how does Young see the presence of religion, more broadly, in the study of black queer life? How does Christianity (as a set of ideas and institutions) figure—or not—in the field of Black Queer Studies?

I want to move to my second observation, shifting from academia to activism, from a Black Queer interrogation of Christian ethics, in general, to the specifics of Young’s constructive concern with regards to practices of family. Here, #BlackLivesMatter comes immediately to mind. On a webpage that details the movement’s “Guiding Principles,” the following is detailed under the heading “Black Villages”:

We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.1

As a social movement set on securing black lives (including those of black women, queer, trans and disabled folks), #BlackLivesMatter is geared toward protesting and disrupting what are understood as traditional “Western-prescribed” ideas and social arrangements (i.e., the “nuclear family structure”). The aim here is twofold: (1) to affirm all black lives unconditionally, and (2) to help create the conditions under which such lives are granted social recognition and protections. As a scholar who shares similar commitments, Young calls our attention to the quotidian ways in which Black Queers sustain one another through forming and sustaining family—all of this, more often than not, in the absence of affirmation, recognition or protection from elsewhere.

Ultimately, to borrow the movement’s metaphor, Young wants to bring readers into a black queer village—as site, source and model of (Christian) ethical reflection. In doing so, she both constructs a Christian ethic in the context of black queer life and posits a queer ethic in the practices of black Christianity. Yet I also read her ethnographic engagement with “the village” as moving beyond analysis and gesturing toward a theology of becoming—a constructive claim—that foregrounds the fluid processes through which both “family” (biological and chosen) and faith are forged in the face (or shadows) of orthodoxies of all sorts and against great odds. Black Queer Ethics, in this way, both calls attention to something that is already apparent even as it invites us all to imagine the human family anew.