Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, which recently won an American Book Award, and editor of a book series on Black Male Studies at Temple University Press.
What is your work about?
My research is about the historical and contemporary vulnerability of racialized males under western patriarchal societies. Particularly, I am interested in how Black males have developed their ideas of manhood and challenged the colonial notions of gender imposed by white patriarchy.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Many of the gender theories used to describe Black males in the academy depend on the racist grammars of the 1960s and 1970s such as hyper-masculinity, or conceptualizations of Black males like the sub-culture of violence. Philosophy usually adopts certain terminology with little knowledge of the origins of the terms deployed. Hyper-masculinity was a term used by racist white social scientists to explain how Black males abandoned by their fathers were effeminized and made deviants by their mothers. Throughout the 1960s and up until the late 1980s, Black men were thought to suffer from sexual orientation confusion and female personality disorders. Because they did not have male role models, Black boys were forced to imitate their mothers. The Black male could not perform or move the world as a female, so he began to reject feminine qualities making him hyper-masculine as a compensatory coping strategy. This, according to white social scientists, explained Black male deviance and their predilection for sexual violence. Despite this history, Black men are routinely called hyper-masculine or toxic at philosophy conferences across the country and by Black and white philosophers in countless departments.
Black men are demonized within the discipline of philosophy and within theory more generally. Black men generally are not understood has having diversity or plural masculinities, and this is despite the fact that practically every survey of Black male attitudes since the 1970s have shown Black men to be more gender progressive and supportive of women’s rights than white men and women and many Black women. Instead of looking at Black men and boys as a diverse and adaptive social group, they are defined as a monolith that is either toxic or feminist. There is no recognition of Black males as victims of rape, child sexual abuse, or domestic violence. I thought I needed to change this.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
Black males are the group most vulnerable to lethal violence, economic discrimination and many forms of sexual violence. Black males are perceived as more violent than whites and their female counterparts, are more likely to suffer death at the hands of a partner or spouse than white men, are routinely victims of statutory rape, child physical and sexual abuse, sexual coercion, suicide, and depression, yet we have no theories that situate their (empirical) realities in theory.
The Man-Not argues for a genre theory, or a theory of Black males as a particular kind or type of being created over time, that serves as the foundation of Black male studies. History is a major component of understanding how Black men and boys have been constructed and why Black and white people alike fear Black males, but so is social science data. For example, the most recent NISVS data from the CDC shows that Black men report being made to penetrate almost as often as Black women report rape over a 12 month period or roughly 264,000 to 272,000 cases respectively over a given year. The numbers of contact sexual violence is similar, yet Black men and boys are not thought to be vulnerable to sexual violence. Since the 1930s, Black males have been disproportionately victims of intimate partner homicide and abuse. They have historically been the most victimized male population, and in the 1970s, they were killed at rates equal to white women by their intimate partners, yet the only theories of Black men and domestic violence frame them as being perpetrators. To date, there is not one study of Black male victims of intimate partner violence, while there are hundreds focusing on white male victims. Why? Our perception of Black men and boys are mired in racist mythologies that deny their victimization and vulnerability to violence, rather than empirically verified theories that explain their relation to lethal and sexual violence.
What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?
Writing about Black men outside of pathology or deviance is unpopular. Philosophers will attempt to censor your work, and deny you public forums to discuss your findings. To do this work well requires a knowledge of social science, history, philosophy, and gender theory. I say this to say I would advise rigor. I would tell young Black Male Studies scholars to read widely and deeply and have a commitment to the humanity of all victims of violence be they male or female, but look for the causes of that violence beyond the popular theories.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
It is my hope that bringing many of the issues that affect Black men and boys to the public they will understand the need for mental health resources, therapists, and inter-disciplinary research on Black male vulnerability. It is important to me that my research in some way improves the lives of the people I study.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
Reading; reading is what ignites my ability to write. This is my ninth year out of my Ph.D and I have published roughly 70 articles and book chapters, written two monographs, and two edited books. I think I was that productive because I am always engaging the research and findings of various fields.
What’s next for you?
Black male studies is a comparative field that aims to inquire into the interaction between racism, patriarchy, and subordinate maleness globally. I am currently writing about the rape of Jewish men and boys during the Holocaust. So I hope to finish a book on the rape of Jewish boys during the Holocaust and a study on Black male victims of intimate partner violence in same-sex and heterosexual couplings.
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I loved your article. I grew up in safe places in the segregated America, or on black side of town. It bothered me that the men would often not talk about how they were treated outside the black community (i.e. at work) to the women and children inside the community. I loved the film Struggles in Steel because, as I used to say, even the ‘silent’ black men talked.
My father taught me to read between 2 and 4. After he had two more girls, I became his de facto son. He would talk to me about things that concerned him. One of his major topics was why Africans were slaves. He would also tell stories sometimes, like how the bosses would let blacks come late or play dice and other games at work. However, when the same blacks asked for a promotion the boss would say ‘no,’ reminding the blacks of their time spent playing at work. Now that I look back I believe that my father’s talking to me was at least partly a way of getting back at my mother. You talk to your daughter and not your wife.
When I went to college I met women who said “I am getting my education so that if he doesn’t take care of me I can take care of myself.” My father was absent but most of the families in the community had a man present. I was surprised one day when I heard my grandma talking about how black men did not take care their families. Later, when I was a teacher, my class started talking absent fathers. I asked students to raise their hand if the father was present. Almost everyone raised their hand. The media’s impact was greater than their own lived experience. Finally, a common experience at HBCUs in the past was that many students had fathers die during the college years; this is something I did not see while working at PWIs.
Years later I was talking to two other women; they were both angry at their fathers. One father had committed suicide. Another had stayed with his wife. My father had left when I was 10 because my mother said he had to go. What was a black man to do, I wondered then, if there was a problem if he stayed, separated from his spouse, or died.
As I went to other safe places or went into the white world, I talked to black men like I had talked to my daddy. I continued talking to my father as well. I hear their words still. I have the memories of seeing men with small jackets walking to work in the cold so their wives could have coats or drive the cars to work in offices downtown. These men told me about the difficulty of mopping at times because the mop was then so heavy. I’ve been in the fights with men who wanted to make me Ms. Anne or have me sit on the porch (as Zora said) while they wanted no more than to be Mr. Charlie. My daddy told me about such fights in the early days of his and other marriages years before.
I loved the above article. (As a side note: I’ve started a survey on black veterans of the Vietnam war; on their trauma and their marriages. I feel that the increase in single parenthood in the ‘80s is partially a result of this trauma.)
[…] Dr. Tommy Curry was recently interviewed by Nathan Eckstrand, an associate editor of the Blog of the APA. Dr. Curry discussed his recently published book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. He discussed, among other topics, what his work is about, what effect he hopes it has, and what advice he has for others seeking to produce similar work. To see the entire interview, click here. […]