The Man-Not by Tommy J. Curry

Author:Tommy J. Curry [Curry, Tommy J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2017-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

4

Eschatological Dilemmas

Anti-Black Male Death, Rape, and the Inability to Perceive Black Males’ Sexual Vulnerability under Racism

AN EERINESS HAUNTS THE GRAMMAR of philosophical discourse on racism that predicates ethical problems and our moral disposition toward Black death: necromancy, which is the result of the death imposed on Black male life, and the Black academic class’s Negrophobia, or their fear of being seen as those Black males marked for death. Necromancy is as much the result of white racist compulsion—the manifestation of the anti-Black phantasm lurking within the mind of the academic that vacates Black male life to an absence upon the impressing of pen to page, which is coterminous with his impending Black male deaths in society—as it is a problem of thought, whereby the thinking about, the speaking of, Black people as (living) human beings aspiring toward ends in the world is made impossible by the obsession white thought has for the Black corpses it creates through rituals of white violence. To write about Black men’s experience of and challenges to racism is to engage in a reflection that is their anticipation of death. Theorizing about Black males involves an existential hesitancy that is grateful for not being that Nigger that is to be killed or doomed. The phronesis of the professor-thinker-theorist cultivates distance from that doomed Blackness that is associated with Niggers. The writing that emerges from the racist appetency of reason seeks to displace the realities of Black men and boys in an effort to preserve the illusions of freedom, democracy, citizenship, and personhood. This thinking, in which the deaths seen in the mutilated bodies of Black men captured by the state and murdered by white vigilantes are in the background of our discourse about racism, insists on the need for Blackness to be reimagined as more social—an urging that demands the feminization/queering/pluralization of Black subjectivity more generally toward a viable living. Instead of inspiring a focused acuity into the nature of white supremacy, these dead men and boys are, in fact, charged with limiting and obscuring our attempts to “get at racism” and are dismissed as fostering an unproductive nihilism. Because subjects live, aspiring toward futurity, the Black male, who is defined by death and dying, is outside subjectivization and morally condemned as an inappropriate source of theorizing about the world. The persistence of Black male death in society is behind this disregard/disgust toward Black male life, as well as the brutality of ignoring Black males’ present plight as a subject of study in the academy.

The suffering of Black men and boys and, ultimately, their physical death breeds fear among Black academics. The fear of being mistaken for those Niggers marked for death motivates them to run away from, not write about, these Black men and boys. This fear is the origin of this disciplinary pathology; the genesis of their Negrophobia is the imperiled existence of Black males in society—a necrophobia. Death conditions how Black people, and especially how Black intellectuals, approach the social reality before them. Death is not simply the finality of some Black lives.

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