The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry Ronald B. Neal Tommy J. Curry. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2017. 298 pp. $34.95. Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood is a groundbreaking work that argues for a new field of intellectual labor: black male studies. In this work, Curry argues from the standpoint of history, sociology, and philosophy that a comprehensive research program focusing on black men and boys is needed. Such a program is called for in light of a persistent condition of death, social and mortal, that plagues black men and boys in the United States. The Man-Not represents a departure from standard race, class, and gender theory where black men and boys are rendered criminal, predatory, savage, and evil. In The Man-Not, such theory is insufficient in conceptualizing and addressing the precarious existence of black males in the U. S. In articulating this deviation from standard race, class, and gender theory and forwarding the theoretical lens and logic behind such an endeavor, Curry states the following: Man-Not (ness) is a term used to express the specific genre category of the Black male. Genre differs from gender by this distance Black males share with Western man a priori, and, by consequence, patriarchy. . . . The Man-Not is a theoretical formulation that attempts to capture the reality of Black maleness in an anti-Black world. . . . The Man-Not is the denial not only of Black manhood but also of the possibility to be anything but animal, the savage beast, outside of the civilizational accounts of gender. (6-7) The Man-Not engages black males as objects of child abuse, neglect, rape, incarceration, unemployment, and death. Concerned primarily with trauma and vulnerability with respect to the black male existence in the U. S., The Man-Not seeks to overcome the historical, methodological, institutional, and ideological obstacles with which a [End Page 246] study of this sort must contend. The Man-Not addresses an entrenched prohibitive morality in academia, particularly among humanities scholars, that limits inquiry into black men and boys to a certain criminal and predatory terrain. With staggering research and effective argumentation, The Man-Not implicates academia as an ally in black male trauma and death and charges that contemporary academics participate in a long intellectual history—over more than a century—that offers fodder and justification for the policing, containment, and punishment of black males. Overall, how black men and boys are imagined in academia is an extension of how they are perceived, policed, and contained as bogeymen in American society. In each chapter, Curry effectively delineates how black men and boys have been rendered as mythological creatures and pathogens in the American imaginary. As such, accounts of black males from nineteenth-century ethnology, to early twentieth-century social science, to proponents of eugenics to government-funded public health initiatives, to the writings of gender theorists, have obscured black males' lived realities. In light of such misrepresentation, popular accounts of black manhood, from the antebellum period to Jim Crow and the civil rights/Black Power eras to the present, are questioned and reassessed. In this rethinking of black men and boys, Curry breaks new ground on subject matter not covered in previous scholarship. Their sodomization in American history, the connections between poverty and intimate partner violence, and the condition of black male death as a bioethical problem are among the underexamined areas taken up in The Man-Not. The book's overarching achievement is that it goes beyond standard accounts and offers a mode of inquiry that is empirical and theoretical, and insists upon new methods for engaging the condition of black maleness. Curry's work extends upon his already substantial documentation of a peculiar racial chauvinism regarding the study and interpretation of black men and boys in the United States from previously published articles and book chapters. Starting from the earliest accounts of black men studied by social scientists like Lawrence Gary, Robert Staples, and Clyde Franklin, Curry expands upon the idea that black...