4 - Reimagining Black men

Summary

The publication of Tommy J. Curry's 2017 book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, was foundational for establishing Black Male Studies as a distinct area of study within disciplines like philosophy, history and sociology. In this conversation, Curry launches a stinging attack on the philosophical tendency toward abstractions and generalizations regarding matters that have profound social consequences, highlighting how philosophy's lack of accountability to the demographic or sociological realities of Black males has left it dealing with caricatures of Black men uncritically inherited from racist nineteenth-and twentiethcentury social science and ethnology.

TOMMY J. CURRY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a personal Chair in Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies. His research interests are nineteenth-century ethnology, critical race theory and Black Male Studies.

DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His current research is focused on dehumanization, race and propaganda . David Livingstone Smith (DLS): A little while ago you said to me, “I’m finished with the idea that one can just wake up in the morning and study race”. You said this in the context of discussing what you considered to be major methodological problems inherent in how philosophers go about writing on race. What are your worries in this area?

TOMMY J. CURRY (TJC): The problem is that philosophy doesn't take race to be a sophisticated field of study. We hire Black people to inform us about their experiences, but we don't expect them to contribute to innovations around method or debates concerning historiography in a way that we do with other scholars within the academy. The effect of this is that we end up using identity as a metric for how we ascertain whether statements being made are correct or not. So, to the extent that a Black philosopher says things that approximate the worldview of white liberals, that Black philosopher is accepted as being a rigorous and intelligent philosopher. Whereas to the extent that a Black philosopher raises questions related to disciplinarity, related to how we study and approach a problem, related to what constitutes evidence for the claims of certain fields, that Black philosopher is alienated.