#54 What is Black Male Studies? - Professor Tommy J. Curry & Annie Teriba

As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown, so every one of our people in this country doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an obstacle, chance, between you and me. You want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand. I know I say this every week, I know I say this every week, but my guest today, I am super, super, super excited to be in conversation with him. Honestly, he has revolutionized the way we think about gender and you cannot go on Twitter these days without seeing someone to quote him or tweet him or tweet something that he said. So today joining me, I have Professor Curry. Thank you so much for joining me on the Malcolm Effect. Oh, thank you for having me. Pleasure. And today, you all know we have Annie as well joining us. How are you, Annie? Just morning. I am well, thank you. Thanks for having me. No, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Okay, we're going to go straight into it as always. Professor Curry, in your own words, what is the project of Professor Curry? Oh, wow. I mean, there's so many. I would say my base project is to reconstitute the theories and interpretive lenses we have when we evaluate black life and black death. And concretely, that means when we look at the problems that plague, black peoples, and even other racialized groups of people across the world throughout the globe south, we seem to believe that violence, deficit, poverty are endemic to those groups of people, that there's something about them that makes their civilizations and society less civilized and civil than the countries in Europe and throughout the West. And what my project is aiming to do is show that within Western categories of progressivism, be it feminism, be it gender, be it liberalism, there's a kind of barbarism and violence towards non-white people. And the effect of that concretely, both historically and sociologically, is that we still interpret the acts and the humanity of black folk around the world as lesser. So my work is heavily invested in using social scientific data, archival history, and just the facts of life, like interviewing black people, victims, etc, to reconstitute the theoretical lenses through which we can more accurately look at black life. Thank you so much for that. So I have to have to just ask this question because my name comes up and I've been a hunt, I've gratefully been able to read some parts of, I'm still reading actually, man, I just recently read your article decolonizing the intersection. Oh yes, I do. So that's an amazing one actually, thank you, because people always use intersectionality as some catchphrase of dealing with all things black and you succinctly and quite surgically terrier apart. So I do want to ask you them, I know it's a very broad question, but when we look at the state of play, is black feminism irredeemable then? I don't know if anything irredeemable, it really does depend on the context, right? And I think you can see me on Twitter constantly saying, this is about nuance, this is about very specific arguments, if black feminism is an interpretive lens or intellectual movement that some black women find to be useful in analyzing their lives, I make no call about that. The question for me in that interpretive lens is, is it accurate, right? Can we point to data, our experiences, our stories, or whatever the case may be, they give some validity to that interpretation of black female life. The problem is, is I think that it becomes over determined where it's the only lens that's used to not only talk about black women's lives, but also black men and every other black people. And the problem I have with that is that as you can see from decolonizing the intersection and even some of the, you know, I'm all about evidence. So if you see me saying something on Twitter, either I'm giving a presentation on posting the screenshot, when you look at the history of black feminism, it, it starts alongside a white liberal feminism. And what's, and this is what's really interesting to me is that despite the academic proliferation of black feminist discourse, there isn't any intellectual history of it, right? You know, you get, oh, it started with the combat he river collective and, you know, this radical articulation, but that's not true, right? Black feminism, there was a national black feminist organization that was started in the early 1970s. And Gloria Steinem, the CIA agent and person who said, you know, incredibly horribly racist things about black men, was one of the co-founders of it, right? We know that she was funded by government agencies and the founder of Miss Maggzene, that she popularized Michelle Wallace's book, The Black Module and the Myth of the Superwoman, which Michelle Wallace now says that she didn't even write. It was a racist white woman who didn't even care about black people, much less black women. So you have this proliferation of propaganda, discourses, writings in the 1970s that are carrying the name of rubric of black feminism that completely gets erased from the intellectual history of the movement. And then in the 1980s, you have, you know, the rise of Bill Hooks as a cultural critic. And it has no data, no citations, right? You just have these assertions that black men are monsters. And the same thing we barely got to show towel when she's writing "Darters of Sorrow." You know, she's relying on the interpretation of white historians that are just saying well, black men want it to be white men, or these theories of cultural inferiority and what I call my work, my Mises, were solidified by white racists, not by any ethnographic or historical study of black men and their ideas. So when black, when you ask a question, is it irredeemable? It has to be reconstituted, if we're speaking about the accuracy that black feminism has to speak about black life, specifically black male. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. I know. Yeah. Yeah, actually when it's a jump in. And I was speaking to Momodoo earlier about this really interesting overlap, right? Where it seems that much of the language that we get from feminist discourses, specifically black feminist discourses, and I do want to kind of get into this a bit more in order to be charitable. The much of the language that we get is like a replication, right? So I guess post-hawk justifications get treated as like the facts of life. And thinking through like the context of like decolonization and the like specific relationship that the constitution of like subaltern masculinity has to the project of settler colonialism. A settler colonialism. So in the American context, you can draw parallels, for example, with the Southern African context, right? Where like the vast majority of domestic labor is provided by black men, it's not provided by women, why? Because women's labor is needed elsewhere within the colony, right? And I do think that we've gotten to a point where there is a tendency to rest on that which we see. And so like specifically on the point of decolonization, we'll come to about hooks in a second. So I do think there's an interesting tension there, specifically on the point of decolonization. I think that an insertion of Fennel here is very important, right? Thinking specifically about the way that he uses one language, which gets reiterated today in a very different way, which is the language of lived experience. We only know what we know, right? We are not privy to the forms of violence experienced by other people, right? So from the vantage point of living life as a black woman, it's very easy to take what we observe of the world, because that's scientific method, right? We observe and record, it's very easy to take what we observe of the world to be the world in its totality, right? When much of the violence that we're talking about is privatized violence, that's the nature of liberal democracy, right, or liberal society. And the problem is that for black women or for women in general, much of that private violence has found its way into the mainstream, whereas like there's a whole host of, and speaking from Nigeria at the moment, right, there's an endemic problem in Nigeria of sexual violence against young black boys that has not talked about. And it's frustrating not because it's about like making it, it's not because of wanting to make a comparison, it's just the way that that violence is invisibleized by the adoption of a specific like westernized framework of feminism, where everybody knows what's happening, right? But I guess what I would say-- No, but that's accurate. Yeah, thank you. I guess what I would ask then is, and we were talking about reconstituting the tools that we have for describing and the standing black life, I guess you get a really, I think, effective account of how we got to where we are today, the question is how do we move forward? Because it seems that the space to even have these conversations has been so stifled by orthodoxy, right? To make the claim, which I think is very accurate, that black men experience gendered violence, they experience violence as black men, not just as being black, would be met within many circles, a huge amount of resistance, and maybe the charge of misogyny, right, said like, how do we move forward from that? Yes. Well, we wait for those people to die, right, like, and I'm not saying that kind of flubbically, ideas take generations to be solidified. The arguments that we're waging about the relationship that black men have to genre violence and to sexual violence and to sexual vulnerability, in that their bodies are constantly reconstituted for the needs of the dominant group, they've met with a female. It's such a paradigmatic shift to the last 40 or 50 years of black intellectual thought that it will be past our time before people understand the materiality of how this operates. Because what we're dealing with are generations of black people who have been socialized, really off of a white liberal feminist lens, to gain legitimacy in academic institutions. And what we're suggesting is that when you look throughout the global South, the materiality of black life simply does cannot be validated or explained by the theories that we've produced in the academy. And these are apoccal ways of thinking of the problem and project. So it will be as the generations of black thinkers that think this way, pass on. It will be when young people have these battles throughout their generations in grad school and in their professional careers. We probably will be gone by that time, or at least in our late 50s or 60s. And then we'll see people writing and thinking differently. But I think the mistake that we often make as academics is we pretend that the argument carries the day. And I mean, this argument has been popularized, I say, for the last four or five years. And despite the fact that no one can refute it because it's just true, the antagonism that I think you see in social media is that shift is the refusal of people to concede what they've built academic careers and personal politics and being challenged in many ways absolutely refuted. So I think we have to be realistic that it's going to be a change in the actual people training and ideas, the change of time that's going to make this resonate more so than any kind of argument or popular. I agree to an extent. I guess maybe I'll just offer a little bit of a pushback just in terms of so I kind of work from the 60s onwards and my project is kind of focused on the changes in how we conceive of blackness. And you can see between decades that there are very rapid changes in how people conceive of what communal identity for blackness is, not just within the imperial court but also in the global south. Obviously, there are material conditions which shape this, the advent of anti-colonial politics, transformations in the distribution of labor and wealth around the world. But I do think that things can change very swiftly. Even to think the idea that the academy sets the turn for the debates and discussions that we are having about political resistance is relatively new, right? We're thinking from the 80s onwards, yes, you have a massive student input in the black power movements and the anti-colonial movements, that's true. But the idea that those people, given that they didn't even have access to tenure, to professorships, to like being able to set the turn of discussions within the academy, right? The idea that I, ideas my great from the academy outwards is something which is very new. So maybe my point is. That's true. Fun? I say that's true, but you're dealing with a different population as well, right? Yeah, and the issue is how technology, communication as well as social visibility are dictated by the conditions of huge, huge liberal platforms and finance. These are the things that we didn't really receive or at least initially receive when we're thinking about the black student movements that turned into black studies and the politics around black power. I mean, when you start getting the four foundation in Carnegie, involved with Dictating the Directional Black Studies Departments and the kind of research that's being put out, that's a fundamentally different shift. I think one that I think someone like a UEP new anticipates at the end of the 70s, but nonetheless one that's been very effective in de-radicalizing what we see as the possibilities for black thought. And we have to remember that while there was rapid change in shift in the ways that black people both socially and culturally understood themselves, one of the on-looking things that you've got even from black people that were extremely moderate through their whole careers like E. Franklin Frazier was that there is not an emphasis in the United States about deconization, but rather a shift towards the issue of discrimination. This is one of the things that I think that the late Du Bois also saw as one of the dangers of integration, is that black people in the United States don't see themselves really as part of the global South. So many of the questions that we see as being apparent as in the rape of black boys in South Africa, as you just mentioned Nigeria, these things are fundamentally disconnected from the ways that racialized men are sexually abused in the United States despite the wealth of disaggregated data that shows that black boys and men are disproportionately affected by sexual violence. So the narrative by which a black Americans are using to constitute their political and cultural experience is largely disconnected from the way that they look at darker people around the world. That has a profound impact in terms of how quickly ideas spread because when you're looking at the 60s and 70s, you're looking at black people participating in an anti-colonial struggle that we call civil rights that links up with other issues against apartheid and how global imperialism. Currently, our focus is on how we increase black wealth or black income and actually create social mobility between classes. So I think the motivation to actually uproot our political systems and ideas are far, far less evolved and motivated given our present context in the United States that it was in the 1960s and 70s, which is why I think there's a stagnation of how we actually translate theory our empirical experience at the ground level into explanatory power in terms of social movements and activism. I think that's why the academy has much more play now. I can agree with you. I was going to add one other turn which is that thinking about the way that the movement of the global South, particularly resistance to the draft in regards to Vietnam, but also the role of like our cheers after the Panthers visit our cheers for the 60s, plays in transforming or radical I think the Panthers to an internationalist position, but also allows them to draw that connection between the experience of the imperial core, the experience in the global South, and I think a lot of the trouble that we have in the imperial core today has been in ability or has been the recession of the horizon of revolution in the global South, whereby because we don't have those movements to ground ourselves, which sounds like a formula because we don't have those movements to ground ourselves, it's very easy to think speaking from the imperial core in the world in which that involves like an unavoidable complicity in certain forms of violence, that the borders of the nation mark the borders of the world. Yeah, I mean, we're in agreement, I mean, I think this is exactly what you get from someone like Zygmaw Bowman, what are you talking about the new poor, right, about how academics take the new poor as objects, I think this is why I went just on him, his work as a resource at her explanations of how Black academics and no humans evolved consistently overlooked a wretched for issues of refer, for a currency of recognition and how they constitute scholarship. I think, you know, in my work, I've certainly made this argument, like in chapter three of the man, not where I suggest that the way that we study Black people, especially Black men, is this problem populations, and I think that this is one of the disciplinary apparatus that you get from Black feminism, because notice, Black feminism doesn't talk about itself globally as an endemic formulation, right, it is, and this is only a woman's work, right, this is an extension of a certain kind of gender apparatus as the fundamental philosophical anthropology of the world, right, it's a universal system that made a women are antagonistic, and all you want me to say, well, that's not true, right, that's not the basis of how we're actually formulating African societies, and even now you have people like Donald making the same argument generally about the locals out. So these ideas that there's not a universal system of gender dynamics, or even racial dynamics throughout the world, is not new, but in terms of how we view those things, academics view the Miss Universe, will precisely because we're taught to take dark continents, dark peoples as objects of investigation that we have distance from, so we're not really interested in whether or not objects have social life. And what I'm pointing out consistently in my work, and especially when this is one of my criticisms, not only of Black feminism, but white feminism as well, is that it creates a certain kind of objectification of racialized men, so that they are already the problem. And this is why I say that they're unthought, right, is that when you hear Black men, you automatically impose a certain kind of hierarchical arrangement and behavior and psychological temperance and tendency on how you think they act. So you've already bought into pathology as the basis of how they're motivated to act in the world. And when I say Black men, and this is why I always are kind of laugh at the Twitter engagements. Most of the issues that people have with Black male studies, is it about the work at all? They're just they're upset because it says Black male. And what's funny about that is that the antagonism doesn't come from the word Black male, because that's like saying Black woman or Black female or Black feminist, right, these are all signifiers right, are signs of a certain kind of body, so it references the same bodies, okay. The issue is when you say Black male, it represents Black men in your mind, and that's where all the antithetian hatred comes from, right? So it's funny to me because what we've been taught to do with stinkers and as even even in the activist circles in the United States is that we create groups of people who are objects that we allow to that we're allowed to define in disregard. And when those groups of people be people from the global south, be a black people in America or in this specific case, Black men decide to speak for themselves, there's a certain kind of violence that's imposed on that group to put them back in their place. And this is the crisis of our current thinking, is that we've, you notice how contemporary Black studies really does file in the pattern of white socially. And what I mean by that is when transness is an issue for white people in the category, Black transness is an issue for Black people in the category, when queer identities and issue for white people in the category, queer identities an issue for Black people in the category, right? You pick any white liberal movement, there's the black incarnation of it within Black studies. And I don't have a problem with any Black group saying that they need recognition or that they need rights, whatever the case may be. But I do find it interesting that the problematics that are introduced into Black life don't come from an endemic source, right, they don't come from a group of Black people suffering and then organizing with other Black people, they come from an academic justification in many ways, our cases for why this form of Blackness is more oppressed and hence more valid than other forms of Blackness. And that's what we start debate, it's cis heterosexual patriarchy, it's a heterosexual child's kids, Black men, Black patriarchy, we've just corrupt adding adjectives and delineations in the kinds of Blackness that should be recognized over other forms of Blackness. And I refuse to play that game. I'm more interested in how different forms of violence are affecting different groups of Black people simultaneously, but I make no qualms about which Black person matters or should matter more than the other. Because what that does is ultimately appeal to a disciplinary arrangement that's outside of what Black people both experience knowing what to act on. And what we've done right now is we've played into this as these are the mandates, these are the fundamental building blocks of how anybody is going to have an academic or activist career. And I think what Blackness studies is doing just as other intellectual movements have done in the past is that it's uprooted the basis by which we think theory speaks to reality, it's questioning the ability of academic theory to go here about the material world. And until we get to the point where we can accept that there are different organizations in building blocks for how we see reality, we're not going to move anywhere. I think it's super interesting. You said you don't want to go into like which Black allies matters. And I say it's interesting because people who use your staff for criticising you will say that oh, but your whole project is an engagement of oppression at Olympics, which I don't see it like that. What I actually see, I see a confusing of lateral violence with the structural. So being this podcast and by the way, this has been a fascinating discussion. I'm just like, okay, I'm learning so much, but kind of stripping it back because the impetus behind me starting this show was literally to provide political education at a level which is accessible to all. So just kind of stripping back, stripping back, stripping back. I want to just ask them when we say or when people from Blackness studies that say Black men are not patriots or cannot be patriarchal, what does that even mean? Well, it means that we have an actual definition of patriarchy that doesn't rely on that antagonism between men and women. And I can explain, I'll explain this very briefly. Currently I was, or this semester I was teaching a class in ethnology. And ethnology is the study of racialized groups of people basically in the 19th century. It was popular in America and the UK. Now once you read ethnology what you find is Black people were not designated as having a gender because gender was an evolutionary system where groups of people had evolved to the point of civilization that they needed men and women to have fundamentally different roles in a society and in a culture and a civilization. So Black people, practically every other group of non-whites didn't have this capacity. So when you started to theorize about gender and at least in the post-bellum system, post 1850s or 60s, you have this idea that as races evolved that men and women take on different roles. And these roles have to be hierarchical. Now one of the things that I think people are surprised about is that when you look at you know suffer jets both in the United States and the UK, they didn't actually refute patriarchy. What I mean by patriarchy in this sense is a very specific modal order where men are at the head of the household, the society, the government and civilization and women are kind of the sake of lieutenants. So throughout the 1800s white feminists were literally arguing that they were the the the evolveders. They are the ones that cultivate a patriarchy. And this is something that I mean this is written in plain day. It's not a mistake. You look at the Susan B. Anthony. You look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They literally say that it's educated white women that can bring care and harmony to to patriarchal power, to the masculine element, the really Charlie Gilman. She says, look, you know, we need women to teach men how to be good white supremacists because white men only know how to care about individuals, God gave women the ability to care for others. So as the white man puts the white woman in the home and cares for her, he learns to be a good white supremacist patriarch, which he calls the man mother and that's what allows the white man to colonize the world. So that's an important backdrop because that's what you get for patriarchy coming into the 20th century. Patriarchy is a unique and specific racial characteristic that white groups had over savage matriarchal or egalitarian black groups. So then you move into the 20th century during the era of imperialism and you have patriarchs namely white men and women colonizing the world. So here's what happens. By the 1970s, you have all these debates where white women are reading Marxism and Freudian ism, saying, well, patriarchy is a system of male dominance, which is true, but it's white male dominance against everyone else and it was built with the help of white women. So it's not until you get black people from the 40 from a term from the lone civil rights movement from the 40s forward fighting against segregation that white women start thinking about themselves as oppressed minorities like black people. So here's the question that I posed to the people of patriarchy, are they claim black men or patriarchs? When did black men become patriarchs? Because the only reference that I could find in any English text to black men being patriarchs doesn't come about until black feminism. Even the literature in the 1970s that's discussing black men and violence and patriarchy says that they're not patriarchs because they have no power. The best thing they could do is imitate white patriarchy and the way they do that is through domestic violence and rape. So when people say there's black patriarchy, all you're saying is black men rape and abuse women, which we think means they imitate white patriarchy. And this is the problem. You have over a hundred years of literature where white people, white men and women are debating and claiming that one of the other group is the originator and caretakers of patriarchy and male supremacy. Think about that. The groups that are now saying white women are now saying there are victims of patriarchy spend almost a hundred years arguing that they were the creators of it. You don't have that on black men's side. We don't even study texts where black men are claiming black patriarchy or male dominance. We don't have a single text or book written that talks about the inferiority of black women from the standpoint of black men. The best I've seen quoted is William Hannibal Thomas, which was a biracial black man at the turn of the 19th century who said that he thought that he hated black women, but he also hated black men because he supported castration, which was a popular debate during the time. So there's a poultry of evidence, it's practically not existed where you have black men telling this idea of male supremacy. And what we've done to justify patriarchy in the black community is not to talk about black men's attitudes or black men's actual proclamations, we've used it to explain disproportionate rates of violence. So when we look at deviance, criminality, domestic abuse, sexual assault, rape, that's what we're talking about. That's what we define as black patriarchy. Well, the problem with that is that that's a criminological lens that was developed as you know, if we're in decolonized intersection, that was introduced by white feminists and white criminologists that hated black people, much less hated and specifically hated black men. So our arguments about black patriarchy are not about black patriarchy at all. They're specifically about how black men are social deviance and how we now call that patriarchy, given the work of a certain group of criminologists and white feminists who wanted to make sure that black people, so black men stayed outside of civil society. So we have to investigate and know that. And what ends up happening is when I say something like, well, black men can't be patriarics, people assume, oh, well, you're denying, and notice the conversation doesn't go to, well, how are you defying patriarchy? Nobody has that. You're like, well, you're denying the violence of black men, right? The issue is that it triggers the question of violence. And what I do in my work and what other black male study scholars are doing is saying, well, look, the reason that you have this misunderstanding is because you have the wrong understanding of definition of patriarchy. If we look at patriarchy as a definition, say, from vapor all the way to, like, Earl Miller and even the empirical and scientific social scientific work you do from Jim Sedanius and social dominance theory and the support in my talking about this, you get a very different view of patriarchy, where patriarchies are based on kinships, right? And this is something that white Marxist feminists thought about in the 1970s as well, people like Heidi Hartman, this is why Sylvia Walby disagree with her. But at the same time, these are real arguments that look patriarchy is a kinship system. You don't have white men creating legacies and alliances with, you know, Asian men or African men. They kill those people. Right? Like this is, I think about it. Like we're embracing a view of patriarchy that says men all men are against all women, yet there's not been a genocide or any specific ethnic or civil conflict directed only at women by any group of men. But we have our ethnic and racial groups that are attacking other ethnic and racial groups that kill all the men and then take the women. You see, we have this, we have this anti-Dolan ad hoc analysis of patriarchy that is practically no historical basis whatsoever because every patriarchy society has been an ethnic or racialized society, anti-capitalist society with military means, has been imperialistic. So the bad, and this is something that we want to talk about too, right? Because she says that the primary engagement of the Western world is based on colonizer and colonizer. It's not men versus women. So we ignore the view of what's that going? Yeah, but we ignore the history of materiality because we have an apparatus that says this has to be the way the things are and it's not true. So black male study scholars are simply pointing out that, hey, when this idea of patriarchy as a minority or as a disciplinarian societal and civilizational force was being decided, it was based as an analogy of race and racism. And one of the primary targets of that group, and this is something even Sharma Gilman says in 1898, are weaker parasitic men. So the idea is that patriarchy wants to dominate women, but to dominate women, you have to exterminate all the men that are related and kin to the women. And that's why you have the same thing throughout, war, genocide, even today, and racial oppression. You have to kill, humiliate, and masculate, castrate, right? So men in order to dominate the women, and that's why no other group in a white supremacist society can be patriots. I think I said that's a very interesting segue. I'm not sure if you've been privy to the recent TL discourse on Palestine, Palestinian men and that Palestinian, and that's interesting because it calls to what you said in the introduction of man not when you said in short, canal theory excludes racialized men from the hegemonic masculinity paradigm, and why find that interesting because when we look at discourse on Palestinian men, people went as far as saying Palestinian men cannot be victims of gender violence because they are men, even if the I.O.F. soldiers are women, when the I.O. soldiers are women, I fool. How and after we get to position where you know, I mean, surely the primary antagonism in the Palestine Israel is literally the colonized versus the colonizer. Yeah, versus the issue of hegemonic masculinity or patriarchy or between men and women, and even if you look at the materiality of Palestine, you find of course Palestinian men experience gender violence. They're heavily incarcerated. They have to go for checkpoints and you know, they violate it sexually. But I know you wanted to go, you had your hands up. Yeah, I mean, sorry. I just, a lot of things that I want to, it's been an amazing conversation. Okay, right. Honestly, I think there's another dynamic of patriarchy which gets very little attention, and this is something that I particularly interested, which is the way that we talk about patriarchy as if it's just about men and women, as if the model of the home, which is the basis of patriarchy, does not also include an originary violence between the parent and the child, right? And much of this is theorized in the 20th century, but seems to have been completely lost from our conversations. And so I often ask the question, when does a black boy become a black man? And we're saying black men are patriarchs, when do black boys lose their vulnerability? And also we, I think the entry point of that conversation about childhood, which is very like important to me, also gives us a route to being able to understand the way that violence has actually produced under patriarchy, right? It seems bizarre to me that we have these conversations about the, it seems bizarre to me that people who, in other contexts, would view themselves as non-essentialists, have these conversations about black men as if there is something inherently violent about the penis, right? Like, as if there is, as if black men are born irredeemable. But where do, if black men are patriarchs, where do they learn this violence from, right? It's the household. But even in the like quintessential ideal patriarchal model, even within the household in that model, violence, black, like masculine violence, is not learned from the father because the father is absent, right? The mother is surprised. It's learned from women. And that's how women become custodians. And there's a really interesting literature on the role of the woman in like Republican society, the particular role of like women in like, in kind of gatekeeping, the model of society and the socializing boys and girls into the behaviors that are expected of them. So I think that, that, that question of childhood is really important and it's especially important when you think about the specific vulnerability of black children, right? And black children are not very naive, they're childhood, so there's that point I wanted to make. And then there's a second point which I think that being sympathetic, there is a, it is very difficult, we're kind of turning to the discussion on the, on the TL, right? It's very difficult thinking about this week, the discussion that happened around bellhucks, right? To have come from a context where you have experienced and obviously people tend to, are more likely to experience violence from people who are around them, right? Where you have experienced the forms of violence and continue, can continue to believe in the humanity of people who perpetrate that violence, right? But it, it's very strange to me that a lot of this discourse is also coupled with Professor Currie talked earlier about the criminologist frame and how black patriarchy is defined by acts of violence or the perpetration of criminal acts, right? It's very weird to me that this is often also coupled with a language of abolition and thinking about the like, after lives of bellhucks and the lives that she lived as well, but like, thinking about how she's been taken up, where on the one hand, it's the same like tension, consistent tension that we see, right? Where there's a positioning specifically of black feminism, which I think is another tension that seems to be emerging with black male studies, there's a positioning of black feminism as the only feminism interested in the humanity of black men. At the same time as the perpetration, or the like, recirculation of precisely the same mythologies about black men, which leads to the violence that black men experience as black men, the idea that black men are inherently violent, the idea that black men are inherently criminal or deviant. So I'm interested in unpacking that a bit more because the other side to it is also understanding the relationship between this and certain discourses of trauma, in which possibility of trauma, like black men are precluded from the possibility of trauma, specifically sexual trauma. And I think that that, if we're to go back to the question from earlier about like, where do we go from here? I think that a very urgent discussion about the reality of sexual trauma in black communities and that the violence that we're speaking of is not unidirectional in any meaningful sense of the word, right? Especially in the space of childhood. But also, I'll stand ten toes on saying like, stop and, like, stop and frisk, stop and search. That's routineized sexual harassment. But the cultural system is like, and we know these things, but we want to separate them in our heads. Sorry. I rambled a bit. But I'm really enjoying it. No, no, but I'm in it. No, no. I think you're making all valid points, right? The issue is, you know, you know, this is why I have that, you know, in chapter four of my book, I do so much work to talk about stop and frisk and search as a kind of sexual violence, right? And the reason I'm doing that is because I'm trying to explain that we have normalized certain forms of, you know, I hate using Foucault, but in this, you know, disciplinary power, right, that we've, that we've talked about how black men are victims of exceptional violence like police killings, but we've, we've made these routine incursions where black men are, their genitalia is fondled, are assaulted, are, you know, are in many cases mutilated. You know, are there, you know, painfully penetrated with the tons and screwdrivers and guns during searches, right? We've, we've simply said it doesn't matter. And I've been on panels, like one of the most recent publications I've done was in a Oxford Handbook on BLM and, and what happens in, it's just amazing. What literally happened was I was recounting given a presentation at a Midwestern University on a panel with BLM and I said, look, there's this huge issue of sexual violence. And literally one of the members of BLM from, I guess, Canada said, well, we're tired of talking about black men. And my response to her was like, well, you know, you just gave a picture show like this is about real analysis. How are you handling the sexual trauma that black men experience in police encounters if your job or your claim is that you're acting against police violence? And for some, for the people who identify themselves as feminists in the group, there was no, there was no sympathy or acknowledgement of that reality, right? So there was a, there's this kind of numbing process where you have a group of people say, well, these other groups of people just don't matter. And this is part of the irredeemability of black life. The reason that black feminism is given the kind of currency is given on black men is not because black feminism provides a liberatory mechanism for black men, but it's because black men are so dehumanized that they get to come in and say, well, we're, we're against the police state, we're against mass incarceration, this benefits you. And that's better than the zero sum game of your absence in the world. And that's why you get this kind of two minds where it's like, well, we, we care about black men, which is why we want to abolish the police state, our abolish the, the, the carceral system. But on the other hand, black men are violent and we may need the police state, et cetera. You know, and, and it's frustrating to me because I think there's two aspects of this kind of abolitionism that gets picked up on the one hand, there's, you know, abolish the prison, et cetera. Then, you know, there's this recent abolitionism talking about abolish, you know, cis had a role black men. And the latter, I think it's completely genocidal. But I think that it's informed by the, the, the, the first in the sense that part of the reason that the carceral system becomes debated amongst black feminists is whether or not they build these groups of intellectuals believe that it's absolutely bad versus needed to protect black women from black men. And I find that to be completely, completely morally deplorable, right? In the sense that the explanation of violence, are their explanations of violence pretend that it's only black men that are endangering the black community. So issues of child sexual abuse, which we know is disproportionately experiences by black, by black boys, physical abuse, which we know is more, is, is more lethal and more, you know, damaging on black boys, at least figure, physically in terms of injury. You know, all these other kinds of forms of violence be a domestic abuse, or even intimate partner homicide, which disproportionately affects black men compared to other groups of men, right? Some of the partner violence are reproductive coercion. All these things disproportionately affect black males in, in our community. We say that has no effect. And the reason we do that is because one of the, one of the, one of the traditions or I guess one of the assertions that meant much of black feminism makes is that black women are fundamentally good and nonviolent, right? And they're getting this from the Duluth model. This is the exact same thing that Ellen Pence said was part of her strategy in getting, you know, the violence against women and, you know, some of the domestic violence laws passed, is that they had to create women generally as absolute victims. They could not participate in any kind of violence. And she says that she knew that wasn't true. She saw it in her own clinic, but nonetheless, that's what they stuck with. Black feminism is still at that second wave feminist level. They're not, they're not having deep conversations about the rates and prevalence of, it's of a partner violence. Our child sexual abuse or physical abuse in black community because much of that is perpetrated by women. Black male studies is having that argument because it's saying that there are social determinants behind rates of abuse, but black feminists don't want to concede that there's social determinants like poverty, trauma, alcoholism, recidivism, etc. that drives patterns of abuse because then you lose the effect of masculine. And if you lose the idea that men or melons is driving violence in the black community, they lose our huge portion of your explanatory power for why you keep targeting men, say, than other groups of people. And this is what blinds is to issues of same-sex violence, multiracial violence, all these things matter, all these things we have evidence for can't be considered. So what we do is we create a political apparatus that says that we can't look at those forms of violence. And now that you have black male studies, actually doing that and presenting it with data and lived experience and narratives of black children and black boys who were safely victimized by black women in their childhood, the only argument you have because you're confronted now with both the testimony and the quantitative evidence is, well, the reason that these black male studies scholars are even looking to explain this phenomena is because they hate women. Right? So what we've done is we've created different forms of apologetics, like, you know, like how medieval philosophers used to do apology and like, what are the arguments to defend yourself from certain kinds of arguments or forms of evidence to the contrary? Well, you give black for misapology. And I said this one when the man not first came out, I said, listen, what's going to happen is the book's going to be well received because I was arguing with the publisher. I was like, the book's going to be critically well received and it's going to sell out. You know, because they didn't think the book would sell at all. I was like, no, this is going to sell. But I was like, what's going to happen is there's going to be segments of the population that are not going to engage it. So I didn't expect all the reviews of the book. I thought people would, you know, it becomes, you know, something that people talk about. I think it was going to be well, you know, well, reviews. But the first thing that started happening, and you could actually hear there are, there are literally conference presentations that are up on YouTube where you see people in philosophy are at gender studies conferences asking panelists, well, look, there's this book now that's refuting our, our theories of black feminism, how can I defend it? So they're, they're trying to cultivate an apology, right? How do we, what are going to be our standard arguments against black male studies when it talks about, you know, black male sexual vulnerability or the vulnerability of black boys and, and, you know, and, and the argument's like, well, we just don't, you know, we, we're just going to say that it's misogynist. Right? That's, that's basically we're just going to all agree to say that when we hear this, we're going to say it's misogynistic and that's what you see, you know, happening in social media. We have an inability to actually assimilate social facts into theories because we've already chosen the black people that we think deserve recognition. And as is usually case, black men are not part of that group. I wanted to jump in because I think that so there was a quote from Bell Hooks, which was circulating this week, but I found this one particularly interesting, and I'll give the background before I read it and then I'll give the ground as to why it's interesting to me. So this says the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women and said patriarchy demands violence of all males, demands of all males, sorry, that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchy men to enact rituals of power that will sort his self-esteem. And I found this particularly interesting because I remember watching, I don't know if you remember when Bell Hooks did a residency at the New School, and I remember watching one of the conversations she'd had, I can't remember who it was, but she made a very point which actually sparked much of the way that I think about black gender and black women. Where she said, look, we have this presumption, right? What we know of the data, when we get told, when people who are feminists get told, women are just naturally like carers, women are just naturally inclined to want to stay in the household and inclined towards domesticity. You can't take the consequences of the society in which women are disciplined violently into domesticity and then say that that's just an innate desire, right? That's very bizarre. So she makes this point that like we always assume that women are matriarchal, that women are sorry maternal, right? But that erases the actually shocking prevalence of violence by women against their children, right? And so what I find really interesting about this quote is how I'm always fascinated whenever I see this kind of thing happening. The invisible actors get, like certain actors get invisibilized, right? So in the household, if a boy is, I don't know, court wearing makeup or if a boy is deemed to have even just the like, oh, boys don't cry, right? Very simple thing. That's not just enforced on boys by men. And I think that this bizarre, going back to the point I made earlier, this bizarre collective delusion that patriarchy has produced simply through interactions between men. And once you put that also into the context of where much of this also comes from, right? Thinking about the lineage of the like Moynahem report and the idea that black male delinquency or like social deviance is produced also by the absence of black men in the household, right? This is another line that's taken up by the American state. Like it just seems very bizarre to me that this is the position that people are taking. Maybe I'm being particularly combative today, I'm sorry, it's, it's, it's, you're not, you're not. Look, listen, this is, you know, to be honest, you know, I'm enjoying the conversation because I think that this is, this conversation is a really good demonstration of the kinds of avenues of thinking that black male studies opens up, right? The stuff that I've been doing on the Moynahem report, you know, and I also have done a lot of this in connection to Bell Hooks because what I find in her work is both an appeal to subculture, violence theory, and Moynahem logic. And I'm saying that because one of the things that Moynahem does is rely on the previous sociological studies about black people. So he's citing people like Tom is pretty grew. He's citing the guy that does the marshmallow test, right? You know, he's, he's interested in the question of what allows black men to fail in this society. It allows black women to succeed. Now, what I've said in my research and in my publications is that there's been a woeful misreading of Moynahem where people have assumed that he's saying, well, black men need to embrace black patriarchy to redeem themselves, and, you know, it gets, it gets reduced down to that. And yeah, he makes that claim because he says that he thinks that the matriarchal leadership of the black community is out of line with the patriarchal solid leadership of the American community that's going to do him the race to failure. But the other part about that is, well, why is the, how did the black community become matriarchal and his argument for that is because of black male deficit, right? He's using argument that says, well, look, black men cannot delay gratification. They have a temporal response for immediate gratification. So they don't see the need of academic success or pursuing capitalistic goals. He calls black men, he flat out calls black men, bad capitalists and bad, bad thinkers. He's saying black women are much more better suited to these kinds of things to, you know, to academic achievement, they're encouraged more, et cetera. So he even has a line in there where he says black, the black community is led by a matriarchal because of black male failure. And while he attributes some of that to discrimination and how black men are treated, the other part of it he thinks is cultural because he's starting to be influenced by some of the subculture violence thinking that's coming about during that period of time. Bell Hooks completely agrees with that. She actually says the reason that poor black men are in jail are incarcerated because they can't delay gratification, right? At the same time when you have people like Committedive Amir saying that black people or black men are a unique subculture that are hypersexualized and focused on sex as a way to compensate for not having. So Bell Hook says the same thing, like it matches word for word. And I think that, you know, given that, you know, I said to Red Decona's intersection, I think many people will be shocked about how closely these ideas actually line up. So then we have a different question. Why then is it that the interpretations we have of black people? Because this isn't even a black feminism question. This is a question of why is it that the people who are calling themselves black feminists are appealing to racist criminology that we've rejected to explain the life of every other black person, right? Because this is why we get arguments about class, right? Well, we know that black people are not more violent. We know that once you control for class, violence disappears. So how then is it that black people and black theorists are using that same theory to justify gender? Because the subculture of violence theory is only saying that disproportionate rates of crime, homicide or rape can be explained through inferior deficit cultures that form in poverty or ghettos versus not, but we, so we recognize when we're talking about black people generally, but we adopted when we're talking about black men. And that's what our gender theories become. See, we, because we're, we're taught not to question black feminism and not to question Bell Hooks or not to question other groups of people that identify themselves as doing gender work, what we've been told is that we, it's, it's almost a prophetic tradition. We just, we have to sit there and listen. We can't critically engage it. If you critically engage, that shows it's your the problem. Well, the problem with that is for the last 40 years, we've allowed these theories that are really based in white, white social, sociology and criminology to dictate how we define black people. Most of the masculine theory that we talk about today is just rehashing the stuff from, you know, coming back into 50s all the way forward. So that's a fundamentally different problem because what we've done is we've allowed the gender category to criminalize black men as fundamentally socially, social demons, right? And, and what I, what I, I don't think people understand the impact of this. I think people hear that and say, oh, well, it doesn't have to be that way now. But no, it's, it's a problem because it explains why every conversation about black men is about black male body. It explains why Bell Hooks work that doesn't have citations about where this data comes from or how she's interpreting the data is allowed to pass. So what we've done is we've, we've made a cultural and intuitive phenomena out of actual debates that were being had and we, and if people are uncomfortable with shaking that lens, which is why we get black men and boys being demonized to the extent they are. And that's why we can't study them as living people and subjects, but we have to confine them to objects that's intuitively linked to violence. So this, this fundamentally affects not only how black people understand and interpret each other, but how black academics do it. So the resistance that you're having against black male studies, the resistance that you're having to even questioning Bell Hooks works in writings is not about whether or not they're true or false. It's about whether or not the humanity of black men justify trying to reorient our refute theories that fundamentally linked them to violence. And that's the problem because we're making careers and we're making intellectual traditions out of the idea that black men are monsters and you can literally trace that in the intellect of a history of black feminism, but since it's a prophetic and revelatory tradition where we have to believe everything that's said, we can't accurately question it or criticize it. And that's what's killing our ability to think critically about this stuff. Bell Hooks' argument about black men cutting off their motions isn't real because, and here's the crazy part. You know, Bell Hooks makes this argument that said that black boys are just, are taught to have sex, right? He uses the F word, but she's saying, black boys only care about having sex, they're only, they grow into manhood through that act. So you know what we did? We said, okay, well let's go ask black boys about their first sexual experience. You know what we find out? We find out that it's incredibly much. We find out that black boys are nervous, that they're unsure, that they rather have sex with their friends. So that is something that's intimate and they feel protective, right? And here's what's crazy about that. Despite her making that argument in 2004, nobody even thought before a year or two ago, when we post this piece, to even ask black boys about their sexual experience. And mind you, this comes under, this is the second piece of the first exploratory study we did, where we were looking at the prevalence of black male sexual debut being statutory rate. So you have two dynamics where young black boys are usually coerced in a sex by older women and the other dynamic which says, well, when they're not coerced in a sex by other women, what do they choose? We see that they choose friendship, care, intimacy and familiarity. So why then does the basis of his interpreting black men come from someone who never even studied black men? And this is part of the acuity, the absence that surrounds black males, that we could intuitively assert what they are and how they'll behave and their psychological makeup without even studying or asking them the questions we theorize about. And that happens under the rubric of gender studies and black feminists. So why is, we don't do that to black women. So what is it about this kind of ethics of care and the process of study that's so different for black boys and men, but is exercised with such precision when it comes to black women and girls. Right. And the answer to that is dehumanization. We don't, we dehumanize black men because they stand in for the monsters that theories are trying to, you know, to save us from. We're trying to save every other group in the black community from these evil, you know, heterosexual black men. And that's miniature mimire. That's Lynne A. Curtis, which is why he said, look, if we're going to make black community safe, we have to take, we have to take straight black men out. That's, you know, Deulo, how do we make black community safe? You take black men away so they can't impregnate black women. You sterilize black women so they can't have more little black men. These things play into logics of population control and genocide that's not based in any conspiracy theory, right? You know, Dorothy Roberts worked on killing the black body. It announces this. It's just that she focuses on the impact the sterilization has on black women throughout history. But it's like I've always asked you, who do you think they're trying to stop black women from having? Because the super predator method is there is a very clear. Cremio, Genesis happens because you have poor criminal, deviant black men impregnating black women and poor communities that produce more criminal, deviant black boys that become black men, right? Self-culture violence theory makes the same argument. When you look at the most extreme forms of violence, sexual assault, rape and murder, black men are the perpetrators. You have a culture where black women want to be single educated and arise and black men don't. Right? This is not, this is not outside the scope of anything that's been debated for the last 30 years. But we adopted, called it intersectional and then we're good to go. Intersectionality absolves us of his previous races. Just still I jump in. I know we're about to wrap up, so three thoughts that I wanted to wrap up with. The first was, when I put my Marxist flag in the ground, I think it's, I'm particularly interested by the role of abstraction, right? By the construction of these categories of gender which allow for a second black women to think themselves on the same plane or within the same, like, commensurate their experiences, which are completely incommensurable with the experiences of white women, right? And the role that abstraction plays, it plays that role for race, which is where I focus, but it also plays that role for gender, right? And you kind of talked about this earlier where we talked about how like imitation basically gets treated as a recapitulation of like patriarchy itself, right? I think that ultimately part of the problem is that the lens of gender itself, and it's very difficult. Obviously these things make our analyses legible for people, but I've kind of found myself moving more and more to speaking on vulnerabilities because what is the usefulness of the abstraction of a black man? Right? What is the physical extraction of a black woman? Because you are considering a whole whole physical experience, right? I'll give an example of this. The irony for me is you talked about how like, there's a particular level of care which is offered to black women, which is not offered to black men, right? But I actually don't think that care even is offered to black women, I mean for me, care, particularly an intellectual work as like Riga, right? But I think that that's. Well, yeah, we have to part of that one, yes, yes. There's also something to be said about the voyeuristic nature of much of these analyses of middle-class, upper-middle-class black women, right? Writing from personal perspective about the criminality of poor communities. And it's interesting to me that the people who I see come out first when we start talking about the humanity of black men and the importance of recognizing and centering the humanity of all black people are people who have to be in community with, by virtue of their class position, precisely the black men who are being deemed as monsters, right? And so like, there is something, again, when we think about the subtraction of the black woman, much of the people who are writing these analyses are not of the communities they're writing about, right? Oh, yeah, well, I absolutely agree with that. I find this particularly interesting because once we start talking through one lens, right, all of these other distinctions and nuances disappear and fade into insignificance, once we start talking about black feminism, they're disdain for poor black men because they are poor, because they are black, and because they are men can be completely obscured because we're talking about the dynamics of women and men now. And so it's frustrating to me, I don't know how we move beyond that, but also, yeah, I know what kind of thinking about wrapping up, but I just, this has been a problem. Well, I mean, what's happening, Jane? But here's the crazy part, when I said the care, what I mean by that is how black feminists seek to imagine the possibilities of black female experience, right? So if you, if something's wrong with a black woman in the sense that she's heard a child, and I think we see this with the, with the Jones case, even the academy where, you know, she was a poor black woman, she murdered her autistic son, went to jail, but a writing program, I think, from Princeton or somewhere recognized or talented, you know, now she's at NYU, and there was a big debate because she got into NYU, but not Harvard, and there's a debate that Harvard should have accepted her and that her past should have mattered. Like, there was so, there was so much humanity attributed to that situation in ways that would never happen to a black man if he murdered a young black girl, right, his daughter. And black feminism has created a kind of interpretive lens that seeks to extend that humanity, even if it's a match, right? There's a possibility that we have to think about as tied to the, the personhood of the person who we're discussing, or to the female body that we're discussing, our person, our female individual, whatever the case may be. When you talk about black men, there is, as you say previously, something irredeemable about them, such that whatever they do or say are whatever harm or injury they bring to the world is not based on their condition, but their nature. And what ends up happening because of that is as you say, the abstractions become useless because there's no extraction away, there's just a generalization for black people, right? And we've used that generalization as if it stands in for how we seek to interpret and engage what what black men are doing in the world, how they acted. We say that deviance ultimately animates them, right, because it's the love for power, the need to dominate rape or harm women and children or our queer people in our communities. So, so we're put in a position of constantly having to accept a small piece of the original sin of black melness as the basis for any project that seeks to redeem blackness. And, and I find that extremely problematic because the issue is in gender, just like I said at the beginning, it's not even black feminism. The issue is the, the legacies and the remnants of black male deviants and the processes of dehumanization that we've brought into black studies, and specifically black gender studies, when we're framing how we talk about black people. And the reason that we get the erasure and absence of violence in black communities generally is because it's the only way that we can make sense of targeting black men. It's like I said in my, in my book, the only reason gender theory makes sense of most black people is because you're racially profiling black men. You're not interested in domestic violence, you're interested in domestic violence committed by black men. you're not interested in sexual assault rate, you're interested in sexual assault rate, you know, perpetuated or perpetrated by black men. And this is what stands in for real analysis. So, well black male studies is trying to do is trying to shift the boundaries and borders of that conversation. It says, no, we're interested in domestic violence, we're interested in all domestic violence, which is why we're interested not just in black men hurting black women, but black women hurting black men, black women, black men hurting black men. You, you noticed that black male studies is the only gender dyspore. There is no other conversation we have currently in gender, even if you take intersectionality, if you put intersectionality on the table, that's trying to see the interrelationship between violence in the home and household with violence in the streets in the society. What else is doing that? Because intersectionality is just a bunch of psychoanalytic assertions. We're actually looking at data, we're actually looking at prevalence and incidence rates. We're actually doing systematic reviews, trying to figure out how domestic violence is conditioned by poverty and trauma, etc. But that's not what we're doing. There's a lack of seriousness when we study the black community that allows that has been accepted in the academy so we can say, oh, violence in the black community, that's because of these dangerous black men. But it's not. It's about the positions that black people have been put in. And it's specifically about the fact that black men are disproportionately less educated and more jobless. So, they're generally poor in the day to day. So, you're going to have different rates of violence compared to black women who are usually more employed or educated. But even that basic analysis doesn't come through. And it doesn't come through because we're theoretically oriented to propagate the idea of black male in humanity as the basis of talking at theorizing for black humanity generally. Thank you so much, Presaka. You've been super generous of your time. This has been a generative conversation. And I'm going to bother you again in the future and have you on again. We have to have another conversation. Thank you so much all you listening to the Malcolm reflect to Mama, do please like comment subscribe please please everyone if you do one thing by man not and also please read decolonizing the intersection that can also be found online. And I'll post for the career and any socials in the comments of this in the description of episode until next time take care.