A Black Boy is Dead

• • black boys and men

Histories of gender and slavery focus overwhelming on women, as if gender and women are coextensive and men have no gender. This observation points to a problem with the conceptualization of sex and gender across academic disciplines. For if there is a structural neglect of manhood in studies of gender, and if womanhood is misunderstood to be synonymous with gender itself, then this approach signifies an extension rather than an analysis of gender ideology, which traditionally inscribes women as being gendered and men as being generic and beyond gender.

Greg Thomas—The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power—2007

 

Introduction:

Last week, Black America’s heart was broken and their hopes and expectations of fairness, justice, and equality shattered. The murderer of a young Black boy was freed. George Zimmerman gets to live his life an acquitted killer, and Trayvon Martin, his family, and other Black men and boys will forever be impacted by the reality that any confrontation with white men and/or women can mean death. Black men and boys remain invisible to conversations about gendered violence and death. Their existence and suffering is replaced by negation, or replaced with only the problematization of any scholarship that seeks to address their peculiar racial existence as being marginalizing to the their Black female counterpart. In short, any work seeking to speak to, and for Black male oppression is attacked for not being sufficiently feminist, and as such, worthy of dismissal and censor.

Being Black and Male is not a Privilege—It’s a Death Sentence

Within minutes of the verdict, Black feminists from across the web began posting and comparing the life of Trayvon Martin to that of Black women killed or incarcerated within the last year. On facebook, Black feminist postings about Rekia Boyd, Marissa Alexander, and Aiyanna Stanley-Jones, were on statuses and shared prolifically. Reiterating Jamila Aisha Brown’s piece, “If Trayvon Martin had been a woman…” these feminist posters/bloggers saw themselves making a point about the difference in the attention Black men’s and boy’s deaths receive next to these Black women’s lives. However, when one actually reads Ms. Brown’s piece one can only be amazed by how causality and history are vacated for ideology. Brown’s piece is written as a response to a Marc Lamont Hill’s interview where he was asked “How would things be different if Trayvon was a young Black girl? Hill responded “[Zimmerman] would have been convicted, because we have this history of seeing Black male bodies as dangerous and threatening and always worthy of lethal force.” Hill makes an observation many Black men and women across the country actually agree with, namely that Black men and boys are by and large the victims of state sponsored murder and violence and white vigilantism. This is not to deny Black women as victims, but to acknowledge the dangers of being Black and male in the United States. A point recently supported by Melissa Harris Perry’s admission that  America is so dangerous for Black men that she wishes her sons away, a burden only alleviated somewhat by “the relief I [she] felt at my [her] 20-week ultrasound when they told me [her] it was a girl.”

Unfortunately, the sentiments that express fear, anger, and hopelessness are lost on Brown and many of her readers. Despite the outrage of the Black community, the powerlessness endured by the parents of young Black men and boys, and the fear of death Black men/boys suffer, Brown seems to conclude these emotions are simply inconsequential to the larger identity politics needing to be advanced.  For Ms. Brown, any and all experiences of violence against Black women are examples that they could in fact have been Trayvon Martin. She begins her argument with a brief point that Black women have been lynched, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by historians or even anti-lynchers back in the 19th century given the cataloguing of Black women’s and girl’s names and alleged offenses in both Ida B.Wells-Barnett’s Red Record (1895) and John Edward Bruce’s A Blood Red Record (1901).  In Brown’s view, however, these women’s lives have been erased and go to prove that if “Trayvon Martin were a young Black woman, we would not even know her name.”  

 

On the face of it, this seems silly. All violence is not the same, so to suggest that Black women who have been focused on less regarding lynching, or police-state-sponsored violence means that an unarmed teenage girl who was shot by a white man on the claim of self-defense would not been known to Black America is non-sequitar. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was clear that lynching was justified against the manhood of the race and used as a weapon to discourage Black economic independence. Contrary to the popular account of Well’s anti-lynching activism as revelatory, Ida B. Wells-Barnett understood the unique vulnerability of Black men, because at one time she supported the lynching of Black men as justifiable. As she confesses in Crusade for Justice “…I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.” After the death of her friend Thomas Moss, she began to understand that lynching was a punishment driven by the desire to murder Black men. When the white lynch mob declared to Ida B. Wells-Barnett that her “sex would not save her,” if she returned to Memphis, it reaffirmed the masculine ontology at the bottom of lynching. It was Wells-Barnett’s debasement to the status of Black maleness that threatened her life and erased her sex. Despite the historical evidence that give ample support for the view that anti-Black death (lynching, police state violence, and public executions) are directed primarily at Black men, Black feminists cannot conceptualize a reality in which Black maleness is a gendered vulnerability that warrants being the center of any account of American racism.

Brown claims that the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Deanna Cook, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Tarika Wilson, despite being protested, taken up by the NAACP in their respective cites, and warranting lawsuits, are ignored because of “Black male privilege,” or the idea that “the victimization of young women is subsumed into a general well of black pain that is largely defined by the struggles of African-American men.” Are they not ignored by the asymmetrical power relationship between impoverished Black communities and the police state, or the general apathy for Black life? By asserting the existence of “a Black male privilege” that somehow remains unaffected by the exponential deaths, imprisonment, unemployment, and poverty of Black men and Black boys—conditions that deserve particular attention, these authors make acknowledging Black male privilege axiomatic, and indisputable.  In short, these feminists claim that regardless of the death historically associated with being a Black man, these Black men enjoy the political privilege of being male, and of being recognized even in death over Black women, some of whom are still living and breathing. Rather than being a serious analysis of how Black men concretely have privilege (education, wealth, mortality, health), this contention is about the ideological politics of academic recognition confined to blogs more than an empirical study offering insight into the tragedies that actually impact the Black community. In the death of Trayvon Martin, Black male privilege attempts to demonize a community that has lost Black fathers, sons, and husbands alongside mothers, daughters and wives for not holding a particular brand of feminist politics. These Black feminists pretend that despite the tragedy of losing a 17 year old Black boy, a child, they are ultimately the arbiters of what his life should mean for the Black community, or what his life would mean if the Black community was not blinded by the ignorance of their hetero-patriarchal pathology.

 

While the Black left, and Black independent news outlets have concerned themselves with the death of Black men and women, as well as Black boys and girls, Black feminists have not made the death of Black women killed by state violence, police brutality, racial profiling, or anti-Blackness their central agenda, unless of course those women were killed or brutalized at the hands of Black men, which makes their suffering fit nicely with their predetermined (Duluth) account of domestic violence. Voxunion presented evidence of Black men and women dying hourly, Redding News Review covered the death of Rekia Boyd, and Aiyana Stanley Jones, as well as the arrest of Marissa Alexander; I  constantly commented on these deaths as topics of conversation on my own radio segment, and Black Agenda Report has reported the deaths of Black women and children alongside their Black male counterparts. But given the gender ideology in the university, these Black feminists feel more than comfortable using the death of these women and children to point out why the death of Trayvon Martin should not be valued as much as it is because he is a Black boy.

Black Males are Victims of Racism and Sexism
It’s sickening that these individuals are now claiming they get to decide how Martin’s death should be valued, but say nothing against the specific white supremacists and institutions that devalued Black life in the first place. The central question posed by Piers Morgan in asking what would happen “If Trayvon Martin was a Black girl,” is whether or not a white vigilante could have claimed he feared for his life and used self-defense as a justification for killing her. Many commentators simply think Zimmerman would have been arrested for killing a Black woman, and the opposing feminist commentaries have offered no reason for this not to be the case. So, in an attempt to “one-up” Black male death, these commentaries pose endless hypotheticals that ask the audience to imagine the Black female victim being raped and sexually assaulted rather than simply being murdered in cold blood. Mind you, these hypotheticals are being embraced as fact, something that would necessarily happen to the Black female victim, despite Rachel Jeantel telling the American audience that she actually told Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman could have been a rapist. This sexualized aspect of racist violence is completely ignored when talking about Black men and boys. Eric Glover and Terrence Rankin were murdered to fulfill the necrophilia fetish of three white teens, and as expected not one “feminist” analysis on the particular gendered vulnerability of these Black men.  But this fear, the fear a young boy may have of being raped, is ignored, because as Greg Thomas explains, “for feminism, gender means for females only,” and as such, only females can fear, be assaulted by, be victims of, rape.

Why are these Black feminists not attacking the comparison between white men’s, women’s, and children’s lives next to the death of these Black women? Why are the deaths of Black men and boys the only comparable examples? Why are they not attacking their figureheads like Beverly Guy Sheftall for publically announcing the agendas of Black feminism in popular venues like the Root, but excluding Black death? Why are these Black feminists not writing about these women in their journals and blogs as analyses of anti-Black death and suffering rather than the reaction to the death of a Black boy? Why is it when a Black community mourns, the feminist response is to divest the meaning the symbolism a Black male life has taken on—a life embraced by Black men, women, and children alike, a life taken from Black families across the world, and a life that continues to represent the fear of growing up a Black boy who wonders if he shall live to become a man? Does this fear of death not warrant political organization around Black male issues and erasures?

In this case, Black Feminism isn’t any better than the white supremacist who denies the political possibilities held by Black manhood. Black manhood is not a pathology; a sickness to be cured by either death or by feminism. Angela Davis is clear in Women, Race &Class that Black men didn’t have male privilege during slavery, because it endangered the slave system, nor did they have it during the civil rights movement despite Michelle Wallace’s contention given the myth of the Black male rapist. Feminists are using this tragic incident to bring further attention to their political agendas. J.N. Salter’s article, “Am I A Race Traitor? Trayvon Martin, Gender Talk and Invisible Black Women” argues that Black women are expected to put their race before their gender and ignore the issues that black women have within our communities,” but this is not an issue for the black community, this is an issue for the Black feminist community who demands that the deaths of the Black women and girls they have handpicked garner the same attention recently afforded to Trayvon Martin.  Haydia Pendleton was killed in January, and her death, the death of a 15 year old Black girl sparked, national attention, so much so that the First Lady Michelle Obama attended her funeral, but this did not create the attention to Black women’s death by Black feminists that Trayvon Martin’s death did. Salter argues that “Black women are expected to put their race before their gender, to choose between their dual identities (“black” or “woman”) at the expense of their full humanity,” but this is untrue since many Black women from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to mothers like Sybrina Fulton have resolved this issue. This is a Black feminist issue that pretends being Black and being a woman should not be criticized, despite the fact that the identity politics lurking behind their idea of womanhood is about their political alliances with, and the benefits they receive from their relationships with white women. Our focus should not be on whether the Black person was/is a woman or a man it should be on protecting our communities from violence. It just so happens that in this case, the case of white vigilantism, Black men and boys deserve much of our attention.

A Conclusion
Of the 300+ Black people killed in 2012 by extra-legal violence, how many names do we know?  Every year, hundreds of Blacks are killed by police, most of them men, we don’t know who all of them are, and they don’t all get marches; some names are never uttered. Black children, little boys and girls, are killed and no one cries, mourns, or marches for them. A white vigilante kills an unarmed teen and suddenly the fear and sorrow felt by the death of a young Black boy is transformed into “the only death Black people care about.” Whereas Black feminism has no problem turning the pain and torture of a community—its families—into a metric measuring Black death and rationing this dehumanizing spectacle into the “meaningful” deaths of  Black women, and then everyone else; the Black community, the dead Black men, “we,” as their voices should.  Ideology (political, moral, or otherwise) is not the barometer of truth.

The indifference to the death of Black men and women from the near silence of this Black feminist academic cadre on issues like state violence, anti-Black death, and murder for their preferred discourses of recognition, be it phrased as: intersectionality, love, or education, is self-inflicted. Stop talking to white women and white people for academic recognition and write about the (Black) deaths of the people you claim should be at the center of consciousness. These posts that continue to react to the importance the Black community has attached to Trayvon Martin’s death, instead of suggesting any analysis of the conditions that gave rise to it, demonstrates the negating drive of Black feminist identity politics against Black men/boys, rather than concrete analysis of Black people’s vulnerability to sexual violence and murder—and how that acknowledgement helps the Black community. These posts show that vitiating Black masculinity is academically profitable, not that the death of a Black boy is tragic.

~ This post was written by guest blogger Dr. Tommy J. Curry, Associate Professor of Philosophy,Affiliated Professor of Africana Studies, Texas A&M University and his wife, Mrs. Gwenetta D. Curry

When Black News Disappears: White Holds on Black Intellectuals’ Minds & Mis-Informing the Black Public.

• • African Americans, media, political parties, politics, President Obama, social justice

Introduction


As an historical entity, the Black press has not only offered critical commentaries and political critiques of the sempiternal racism of the modern world, but  correctives as to how white newspapers, opinion-makers, legislators, and most importantly the white public sought to justify their complacency towards and support for anti-Black racism and the sexual brutalization of Black men, women, and children. Today, however, the post-Obama lullabies of racial détente and the progressive liberal passivity of Black intellectuals have allowed the structural and ideological manifestations of white supremacy to remain unquestioned despite their persistence alongside the growing realities of Black death. For example, when Trayvon Martin was killed, Melissa Harris Perry thought it prudent to use the tragedy as a moment to teach white folks “how to talk about Black death”—she literally created a checklist for whites rather than deal with the horrors facing young Black men and boys in their communities.

Currently, the post-racial idea has contoured Black news into a narrow politically progressive ideology. This ideology is thematically geared towards convincing the Black public that the symbols of racial progress are in fact actual progress. This contest over “symbols,” rather than exposing the propaganda of the liberal endeavor, allows Black academics to retreat into their own ideologically predetermined blog’s rendering of “Black” events, so that their views, be it feminist, leftist, or progressive, are legitimized. Meanwhile, the Black public remains victimized by the political interests of multiple entities; each with their agenda rooted in de-radicalizing Black consensus and normalizing Black deaths, specifically the death of Black men, as having nothing to do with racism, merely accidental rather than systemic. As I have argued previously, Black academics and news personalities are rewarded for pimping out “the delusion of hope” to Black people while racism increases alongside the normalization of their death, incarceration, and poverty.

Has the Black Press Lost Its Way?

Since slavery, Black abolitionists, ministers, and revolutionaries understood the need for “Black perspectives,” on the racist evil that plagues America. The Christian theology that justified the horrors of slavery was indicted, and the white Christian, the earliest imperialist, was not held to be the savior of civilization but its greatest detractor whose abuse and degradation of Blacks was rooted in their imperial lust for power and profit. As David Walker says in Article I of The Appeal

“I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect. I have therefore, come to the immoveable conclusion, that they (Americans) have, and do continue to punish us for nothing else, but for enriching them and their country. For I cannot conceive of anything else”

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With the rise of Freedom’s Journal, the Black press took on the radical mission of liberation that up to that point was confined to pamphlets, and the now revered slave narrative. The Black press, its editors and writers, were among the most notable Black thinkers of the 1800’s and beyond. T.Thomas Fortune’s (1856-1928) The New York Age was the training ground for no less an intellectual than W.E.B. DuBois. It was a publication where Fortune’s radicalism which advocated for Black self-determination and security, even by armed resistance if necessary, was center stage. It not only gained him notoriety among Black journalists but earned him the admiration of the young Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) who would continue to develop his political philosophy of agitation and help build the first civil rights organization for Black rights; the Afro-American League. This radicality was present in most of the Black journalists at the turn of the century. Henry McNeal Turner and John Edward Bruce exemplified a political tone that was only matched by the radicality of the 1960’s and 1970’s in the founding and growth of the Black Panther Party and the journalistic accounts of the Black Power Movement. As my student, Ms. Judith Bohr, points out in her master’s thesis “A People’s History of Philosophy: The Development and Ideological Segregation of Black Nationalism,” the violence against Blacks in society, be it at the hands of police state militarism or the prison industrial complex, necessitates a compliant and complacent account of reality. As she states,

“The media assists in this erasure of police violence through their portrayals of African Americans as a danger to society…Whites’ fear, however, is for their privilege and not for their safety…Propaganda in the media functions through erasure and through distortions of the state’s as well as the public’s motivations for racial violence” (Bohr 2011, 30).

Thus, the de-radicalization of Black news and the complacency of the Black journalistic endeavor—its commodification into  predetermined categories, that ironically have academic currency despite being driven by political interests—does little to inform, much less improve, the conditions of Black people. The silence of mainstream Black news on the systemic political and economic divisions, divisions made necessary by the militaristic racist endeavors of the U.S. government, even under a Black Obama administration, is imperative in preventing the Black public from engaging the concrete American condition confronting Blacks, immigrants, and the poor.

Most recently, SiriusXM decided to change Sirius 128—The Power to urban driven entertainment programming under the new title of the Urban View. In doing so SiriusXM eliminated ReddingNewsReview, an independent Black political commentary dedicated to exposing the contradiction between Black political representation in the Obama era and Black political exploitation under Obama’s administration. The change in the lineup effectively changed the Power 128 from the “News and Issues” category to the Urban View 110 a “African American Talk and Entertainment” channel. Reacting to this change, Wade Simmon wrote a splendid editorial asking, “Is SiriusXM Trying to Undermine Black Power?” The effect of this censorship could be isolated, but it again begs the question as to why independent Black radio and press that dares to question the status quo of America’s race problem is so easily engulfed by liberal reformist agendas that take Obama’s symbolism to be of more importance than the actual economic and political viability of mass Black agendas.

Despite the criticisms one may make of Redding, the reality is that Black Americans lack a non-partisan interpretation of the Black condition that does not retreat into the ideologies of the blogosphere, where select academics, married to predetermined paradigms of reading Blackness, meet and greet. The Black public is usually deemed irrelevant in these deliberations from the outset. They are to be “spoken about” authoritatively, but rarely “spoken from,” since these Black people are outside the academy, and lack the supposed knowledge/education to “understand” the complexities of Black life. Independent Black radio, reaching back to the Ralph “Petey” Greene and radicals like Robert F. Williams, sought transgressive messages against empire and racism. Whereas today, many Black elites, the Melissa Harris Perrys of the world, confine discussions of racism to their specific opportunities to gain social capital and recognition from whites; choosing to ignore both the material consequences of the liberal agenda for Black people at home and its militaristic program against darker peoples abroad. ReddingNewsReview, like that of Voxunion, sought to disrupt that narrative.

The same way Ida B. Wells-Barnett decided to report the horrors of Black reality, anti-Black violence through lynching, and the weakness of Black leadership in the 1890’s, so too did Redding in the 21st century. At the very bottom of Black politics, there is a need to recognize that the manipulation of Black media—the Black press and radio—to further the political agendas and social legitimacy of specific parties, namely the democratic party’s claim that they represent the Black/Browning of America, does nothing to arrest the imperial agendas this presidency like all presidencies before it continue to engage in the world over. As Dr. Jared Ball argues in his talk on “Colonialism and Media Psychological Warfare,” media, or rather propaganda, is at the heart of America’s white supremacist empire.

Conclusion:

Race-crits, critical sociologists, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars cannot continue to embrace the symbolism of progress without making those symbols resonate with the actual economic, political, and extra-legal conditions of Black existence. There is a very real contradiction between the symbolism of Obama’s reign and the worsening plight of Blacks under Obama’s reign. Rather than being at odds with the type of progressivism that perpetuates the poverty, the apparati of state sponsored violence, and social repression, the Black press has taken to excusing it—pointing out the extraordinary cases of violence that shock us most, but leaving the racist narrative written into the foundation of America’s democracy, militarism, imperialism, and capitalist lust untouched.

Benign Neglect of Suffering among Blacks and the Poor: Why Race-Crits and Justice Scholars should care about Regulating Stem Cells as Drugs.

• • African Americans, Americans of color, health, medical care, racism, systemic racism

“Health is politics by other means,” is the first sentence in Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (2011). This sentence echoes a certain veracity not only in the present day obstacles that continue to confront Black Americans, the poor and the ill, but also points out the multidimensional and rich considerations of the civil rights movement that are usually overlooked in favor of dogmatic recitations of equality. Today, the same racial and socio-economic inequalities like access to health care or the ability of minorities to obtain an equitable quality of treatment that were of concern to our civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, are still largely ignored in academic and policy circles alike. Unlike these past conversations that focused on the ability of Blacks, the poor and women to obtain treatment, we are currently confronted with a situation where FDA policies declaring human blood and the cells within this blood to be biologic “drugs” in need of federal regulation.

While there has already been some critical commentary on the regulatory over-reach of the FDA in declaring that “stem cells are drugs,” in Mary Ann Chirba and Stephanie M. Garfield’s “FDA Oversight of Autologous Stem Cell Therapies,” race-crits, critical sociologists, and critical theorists have not yet commented on how this denial treatment to sick and ailing patients–which not only violates one’s personal liberties, but propagates the already widening gap of pain and suffering for marginalized groups in America. While there will be any number of debates as to the effectiveness and long term safety of adult mesenchymal stem cells for years to come, early clinical studies have shown positive results—namely the decrease of pain, the increase of knee cartilage, and the improved functionality of joints. (See S. Wakitani et al., “Safety of Autologous Bone Marrow-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cell Transplantation for Cartilage Repair in 41 Patients with 45 Joints Followed for up to 11 Years and 5 Months,” Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine 5.2 [2010]: 146-150). Beyond the clinical efficacy of said treatments, there remains a central concern raised by Patricia A. King in “Justice Beyond Belmont,” that is often overlooked in addressing healthcare disparities amongst the most vulnerable populations in America—namely do these groups have the same right to innovative medical treatments that show promise in decreasing their pain and suffering as the privileged?

The FDA’s argument for Regulating Adult Mesenchymal Stem Cells and the Slippery Slope towards an Indifference of Pain

What we are dealing with today is the attempt of a federal entity to extend its power over human bodies and the blood and blood products of those bodies under the auspices of its obligation to protect public safety. Remember the idea that stem cells could be regulated as drugs is the result of a procedural change in 21 CFR 1271 in 2006. The relevant section of that document currently states that:

[h]uman cells, tissues, or cellular or tissue-based products (HCT/Ps) means articles containing or consisting of human cells or tissues that are intended for implantation, transplantation, infusion, or transfer into a human recipient.

Before 2006, the bolded section here stated “another human recipient.” This legalese now gives the FDA an unbridled authority to regulate blood and blood/tissue products that do or could be used therapeutically in the human body. While the legal debate is concerned with the parameters of “minimal manipulation,” the societal effects of such indeterminate language opens the door to any number of FDA regulatory claims of human blood and cell products without clear guidelines and delineations as to the how or why human bodies and the blood and blood products of these bodies are subject to government oversight.

This is a dangerous precedent and one whose larger social, political and ethical implications have been overshadowed by the deliberate manufacturing of a looming public safety catastrophe from therapies involving stem cell treatments. If we read this procedural change in the context of the Regenerative Sciences case, and the recent attempts of the FDA to regulate the reproductive freedoms of consenting adults in America, we can observe a frightening pattern of government encroachment on individual freedoms and our civil rights—those rights that are supposed to protect American citizens from government intervention in their private lives. What is of even more concern for the civil rights minded and social justice oriented is how this small governmental regulation can amplify already disparate and racially determined healthcare treatment and failure of meaning pain intervention in racial and ethnic minorities’ lives.

Racism, Economic Exploitation and the Ethical Significance of Pain and Suffering

Poverty and the lives of the injured working class are filled with complex dissonances meant to deny the effects of disability and chronic pain to remain employed and economically viable. (Irmo Marini “The Psycho-Social World of the Injured Worker,” in Psychosocial Aspects of Disability: Insider Perspectives and Strategies for Counselors [New York: Springer Publishing, 2012], 287-314.) This effect is only amplified when we speak to race and racism in the healthcare system. As Carmen Green et. al. argue in “The Unequal Burden of Pain: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Pain,” racial minorities experience more severe pain and less pain intervention by physicians throughout the healthcare system. (Pain Medicine 4.3 [2003]: 277-294.) As a group, African Americans are more emotionally and psychically tied to pain (Joseph Riley et al. “Racial/ethnic differences in the experience of chronic pain,” Pain 100.3 [2002]:291-298), but less likely to pursue medical treatments to intervene in cases of arthritis or other orthopedic ailments. In short, they don’t want to be cut on (Joanne M. Jordan, “Prevalence of knee symptoms and radiographic and symptomatic knee osteoarthritis in African Americans and Caucasians: the Johnston County Osteoarthritis Project,” The Journal of Rheumatology 34.1 [2007]: 172-180.)

This is not simply an issue of disparate access to treatment, but the deliberate regulative intervention that suggests that pain and suffering can be concentrated amongst specific racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups without hesitation. Just as we think of racism and economic exploitation as the intentional dehumanization of human beings, so to should we begin to think of pain and suffering as the vacating of humanity the unhealthy socially marginalized minority. As Edwin Lisson powerfully states in his 1987 article “Ethical Issues Related to Pain Control,”

pain is dehumanizing. The severer the pain, the more it overshadows the patient’s intelligence. All she or he can think about is pain, there is no past pain free memory, no pain free future, only the pain-filled present. Pain destroys autonomy: the patient is afraid to make the slightest movement. All choices are focused on either relieving the present pain or preventing future pain, and for this one will sell one’s soul.

Currently, there is not a bioethical conversation concerning the benign neglect of the oppressed’s suffering through the manipulation of medical disparity.

Conclusion

While the emphasis on intersectionality and discourse analysis have continued to privilege individual identity over structure, so to have these politics overlooked the overt manipulation of policy against racial/ethnic/ and economically disadvantaged folks. The overlap between the economic and racial segregation of urban African Americans and their experience of chronic pain suggests that the silence of race-crits and social justice scholars in this area, specifically concerning FDA regulations, is unjustified. The reduction of pain and suffering amongst the racially oppressed remains as it was in the 1960’s a very real and tangible civil rights issue. We only ignore this reality at the peril of our work and attempt to effect meaningful social change.

He’s a Rapist Even when He Ain’t: Black Feminism and the Perpetuation of Black Male Rapist Ideology

• • African Americans, feminism, law, racism

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.
Crusade for Justice—Ida B. Wells

You know, I can see how Kobe Bryant could have done it…how he acts, his personality…I mean, he looks like a rapist.
Conversation with popular Black feminist blogger

The ongoing debate between Ebony.com and the popular feminist blog “What About Our Daughters” over the now removed article entitled “From Notorious to Glorious: Why Genarlow Wilson Is No Child Molester and Never Was,” by Chandra Thomas Whitfield, demonstrates more than a war of ideas—it has come to articulate a central idea between what is popularly considered feminist— and by effect for Black women— and how everything else that is not feminist is by necessity against Black women. Unfortunately, the central idea under contention is not one of degree, measured by the extent to which an action or concept benefits Black women, but categorical, as to whether or not a Black women’s magazine MUST on that basis understand a Black man charged with rape as being culpable, a priori, of rape.

Unfortunately, the discussions by Ebony.com concerning the celebration of Mr. Genarlow Wilson’s matriculation from Morehouse University have been depicted as the magazine and organization “siding with a rapist,” despite the fact that Mr. Wilson was never convicted of rape. Rather than a call for any substantive justice, these conversations demonstrate how deeply rooted the myth of the Black rapist is within the discursive moralism of these recent Black feminist pronouncements, and ask a public, without evidence or factual context, to treat Mr. Wilson as a rapist and sexual predator regardless of policy and legal opinion to the contrary. As the aforementioned quote by Wells cautions, Black men and anti-racist thinkers alike cannot take on faith than any ideology, including Black feminism, has totally separated itself from the historical and sexual vulnerability of the Black male to the rapist myth.

The Genarlow Wilson Case: The Facts and Context of Wilson’s Conviction for Aggravated Sexual Molestation.

It was a New Year’s Eve party at a Day’s Inn in 2003 where Mr. Genarlow and five of his high school friends had sex with a 17 year old classmate and oral sex with a fifteen year old Tiffany Cannon. When 17 year old (Morgan) awoke to find herself naked, she called her mother to pick her up from the hotel, and claimed that she thinks “they raped her.” Morgan’s mother called the police; they raided the hotel room, found a video tape of the sex act, and charged the boys with “rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, aggravated sodomy, and aggravated child molestation.” Mr. Genarlow, the only accused of the Douglasville Six to not take a plea deal, was acquitted of the rape charge of the 17 year old Morgan, but convicted for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year old Cannon. Because oral sex was considered “sodomy” under Georgia law, Mr. Genarlow was not protected under Georgia’s “Romeo and Juliet” law (close-in-age exemption) established by Dixon v. State (2004), which according to O.C.G.A. 16.6.3. would have made his “[felony] aggravated child molestation conviction which carries a mandatory 10 year sentence and registry as a sex offender into a [misdemeanor] statutory rape conviction punishable by up to a year in prison.” In fact, the very next year, (April 28, 2006), the Georgia legislature changed the law that imprisoned Wilson for 10 years eliminating the distinction between sodomy and sexual intercourse.

The details of this case, which seemed to be clear cut in the mind of the jurors and legal analysts for the last decade, especially since there was a video tape of the sex acts between the six boys and two girls that night, have recently come under attack by some Black feminists who seem to believe that Mr. Wilson has in fact gotten away with rape. Despite being convicted for consensual oral sex with a 15 year old when he was 17, and sentenced for 10 years by a law that was later deemed “cruel and unusual punishment” by the Georgia Supreme Court, Mr. Wilson is now said to be a “gang-rapist,” who continues to lie and erase the suffering of the female victims in the incident..

To substantiate her claim that Mr. Wilson is a rapist, Ms. McCauley offers a quote from an “attorney who saw the videotape during the trial,” and believes that the tape showed “a gang rape of a semi-conscious, 17-year-old girl, followed by a bizarre display of sexual precociousness by a 15-year-old girl.” What Ms. McCauley fails to disclose to the reader is that this is not the testimony of just any attorney interested in the case, but the unsolicited opinion of William J. Atkins, the longtime friend and employee of Georgia District Attorney David McDade, who published a defense of McDade’s (non-racist) character and integrity.. The irony of this defense, and the narrative advocated by McDade, who has been tried for sexual harassment (Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 16, 1999), is that McDade himself was threatened with criminal charges for the distribution of child pornography, since he believed it was legal to make copies of and distribute the “sex tape” of minors to the public, news outlets, and members of the Georgia legislature. McDade later defended his actions as necessary due to Georgia’s “open records” laws (Atlanta Journal Constitution, 7/16/2007), but the federal prosecutors office of Georgia declared possession and distribution of the tape a violation of child pornography laws (Carlos Campos, Atlanta Journal Constitution, 7/13/2007).

Despite the concerns of community leaders, federal prosecutors, and even juvenile and family experts like Karen Baynes who warned that the release of that tape victimizes all the juveniles involved and “re-victimizes the girls involved,” there has been no serious journalistic or academic conversation as to how the criminalization of teen sex and the puritanical adjudication of this common and normal activity victimizes Black children ignorant of the law and its use.

What I find most troubling and dangerous about the position that the author of “What About Our Daughters” takes is the hypocrisy of how a public audience is supposed to evaluate the character and culpability of Mr. Wilson. On the one hand, Ms. McCauley urges the readers, and Ebony to label Mr. Wilson based on his conviction as a “child molester.” As Ms. McCauley says about Ebony.com’s article “From Notorious to Glorious: Genarlow Wilson is No Child Molester and Never Was,” “Yes, this article title is a lie—he is in fact a convicted child molester.” Ms. McCauley is correct; he was convicted by a jury of aggravated child molestation, but also acquitted by that very same jury of rape. So why does Ms. McCauley insist on believing Mr. Wilson is a rapist despite the findings of the jury and courts she tells us as readers we should trust?

The tape was shown on CNN on February 17, 2007, and seems to suggest quite strongly that rape was not a justifiable conviction. When Georgia Senator Eric Johnson tells viewers that we are witnessing a rape of an unconscious 17 year old, and the molestation of a 15 year old drugged and intoxicated by the 6 boys, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez steps in correcting his interpretation of the events pointing out that the 17 year old was not unconscious and was not physically forced to have sex with the young men, the 15 year old did not drink at all that night, and points out that Johnson maintains an interpretation of events the jurors said was not present on the tape. Journalist Maureen Downey (Atlanta Journal Constitution, 10/10/2006) reported that one of the boys was concerned for the health of the 17 year old and asked if “she needs to go to the hospital.” Even the 15 year old’s mother, Veda Cannon, came to the defense of Genarlow Wilson and stated that her daughter told her that the sex between her and Wilson as well as the other four boys was consensual (Jeremy Redmon, Atlanta Journal Constitution, 6/14/2007), though McDade was adamant in censoring and even threatening Veda Cannon when this hit the airways (Maureen Downey, Atlanta Journal Constitution, 7/9/2007).

The O.J. Defense?: Just Because It’s Black and Feminist Doesn’t Make it Right!

The conversations surrounding Mr. Wilson’s path to matriculation from Morehouse by popular Black feminist blogs perpetuate a dangerous complacency towards institutional racism, white supremacy, sexual predator myths, and ideology that Black intellectuals cannot afford. The trope of “centering Black men,” judging situations by the “genitalia involved and not the circumstance” strives to deem the moralization of Black men as rapists as the categorical imperative of gender advocacy. I find it morally deplorable that readers are being told to support a sodomy law that not only is deployed against Black men disproportionately, but homosexual teens as well. Remember even the author of the Child Protection Act of 1995, Sen. Matt Towery was clear that his bill was never meant to police teen sex, or convict Genarlow Wilson as a felon child molester.

Should we ignore the historical milieu of these charges, and ignore the tribulations of Marcus Dixon, the reality that oral sex between married (hetero) couples was illegal until 1998, the fact that until 1996 sex with a 14 year old was legal, or that Kari McCarley, a 27 year old white woman who had sex with a 16 year old male student got 3 months in jail and probation in Georgia? Identity politics should not trump facts; if anything they should make us better aware of the complexities and dynamics of white supremacy. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the aim of this recent attack against Mr. Wilson. We want to avoid the logic of a recent feminist reply to the disclosure of these facts I recently received on Facebook: “People are acquitted of crimes they commit all the time! Need I say OJ? Come on Tommy, we all know he did it!”

De-radicalization of Racism: How and Why Philosophy Under-Specializes the Development of (Critical) Race Theory

• • academic, African Americans, Black scholarly tradition, critical race theory, education, philosophy, racism, whiteness, whites

There have been a lot of nasty-ass rumors embraced by philosophers and your run of the mill academicians surrounding the material substantiations of time as “histories,” and the meta-physical “flow of time,” as linear continuum towards progress and development. It is assumed without provocation that the variety of “histories” offered by racialized oppressed peoples enclosed within [H]istory—understood as a universal account of white civilization—emerges as continuities that further the evolution of not only our American society, but the edifice of the West. In short, we are told to believe that the multiple histories that now emerge at this moment are in fact the inevitable result of the genius of the Dialectical Hemi-(spherical engine) driving the expression of multiple subjectivities. But time need not revolve around such a mythical perspective; a perspective that demands from colonized people that they cherish their past enslavement and historical debasement by racism, and accept that their contemporary suffering, their present dehumanization, and their ongoing exploitation by the political economics of the university, blessed them with the post-colonial discourses to be shared with a now attentive white audience waiting to take stock of their critiques. The dominant schema of America’s liberal democratic order suggests that history be read and time be gauged by the falling away of the organized oppressive structures of the past, where the present is known by the remnants the last fading vestiges of racism, and the future will be identified by the absence of the barriers and attitudes of the past and present filled with only enlightened white folks who are adamantly against racism. This progressive teleology—the idea solidified by integration which suggests racism and the political economics of white supremacy will simply disappear over time—is the largely accepted political dogma of not only our social life, but the unquestioned paradigm of our academic lives as well.

As a function of its unique specialization, academic education determines for us what figures and categories are synonymous with knowledge. As such, even the most creative scholar who aims to be “radical,” forges their weapons from the formal templates of criticality outlined within disciplinarity, where the newly acquired linguistic armaments of race, class, and gender do little more than justify the revisions made to already bourgeois Black women’s thought like Anna Julia Cooper so that they may be copyrighted as canonical figures and made into Black feminists who truly supported the pluralist democratic ethos realized by America’s civil rights era. While intersectionality, popularly referred to the study of “Race, Class, and Gender,” what I have called the “trinity of bulls**t,” in previous writings, remain the three stooges of any inquiry into racist oppression, this rhetorical trope does little to tell the reader anything about the actual methods and/or concepts needed to understand the complicated nexus between racism, political economics and sexual exploitation.

It only contends that we should make “discursive space” to hear from the subjects many have agreed to believe come to embody this allusive trinity. As Peter Kwan has argued in a series of articles entitled “Jeffery Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories,”“Complicity and Complexity: Cosynthesis and Praxis,” and “After Intersectionality,” intersectionality (specifically the idea of race and gender) has been used primarily as a tool to center an identity politics that justifies defining race and gender as Black women, rather than on the systemic dynamics of racist sexual exploitation. In short, the rhetorical tropes of race, class, and gender are thought to be evidence of something like rigor and interdisciplinarity, but in reality they announce categories that disciplinary consensus has decided are represented by specific antebellum women authors compatible with integrationism, feminism, and the revisions to and selective reading of their thought along these lines.

Similarly, I have argued in previous works like “Concerning the Under-specialization of Race Theory in American Philosophy: How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field,” that disciplines reward scholarship dealing with race that abide by the correct ethics of disdain,—

those ethics that outline the proper rules of engaging racism and colonial oppression—so that the resulting engagements of non-European peoples against their oppression can qualify as philosophy is of the utmost concern(Curry 2010, p.50).

These ethics de-radicalize analyses of racism, because an actual investigation into racism in the discipline of philosophy would begin with institutional criticisms that attack the organizational integrity of philosophical organizations like the American Philosophy Association (APA), the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the largely white philosophy departments with histories of racial discrimination, and the work of white philosophers contributing to the erasure of Black, Latin American, and Indigenous peoples in an effort to solidify white thinkers authority on racism and colonialism over and against the reading of authors who are part of the groups that actually suffered under oppression. In philosophy, this is largely done by explaining away the racism of white scholars like John Dewey (who supported segregated education, assimilation, and the naturalness of racial antipathy) and Josiah Royce (who advocated the United States take up the “white man’s burden,” and British colonial administration in the South) , and revising the theories of European thinkers like Immanuel Kant (a figure Emmanuel Eze demonstrated was not only racist, but responsible for racial taxonomy), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who supported slavery and argued Africans were outside of history and civilization) and Michel Foucault (who not only steals his analysis of prisons from the Black Panthers, but dismisses the persistence of racism based on skin color), so that what the discipline says counts as their (now revised and inclusive) “non-racist ideas,” amounting to little more than proclamations that Americans should strive toward democratic progress, and that (white) individuals are moral and rational, take priority over the highly developed racist associations (think Josiah Royce’s idolization of Joseph LeConte), anthropologies (think of Kant’s founding of physical geography and pragmatic anthropology), and actual thoughts of these historic white thinkers. Failure to abide by this disciplinary etiquette results in being labeled as “ideological,” “political,” and “anachronistic”—a nasty ad hominem intended to suggest that the scholar in question has no grasp of history despite the deliberate ahistorical nature of reading American and European authors of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century as being in line with sixties’ brand Kingian integrationism.

These aforementioned propagandas are meant to deter the young Black philosopher from questioning the institutional legitimacy of philosophy’s disciplinarity. The initial strategy pursued by many departments is usually positive and involves offering the young Black philosopher evidence of inclusion and progress in the field. This is usually done by showing the Black graduate student/s that the department either has people who write on W.E.B. DuBois and/or Frantz Fanon or people who are sympathetic to these authors’ work. This is usually combined with introducing the student/s to one or more of the Black philosophers who comprise less than 1% of the discipline in an effort to show the student that there are people who look like them doing work in philosophy. Mind you, very rarely are these gestures followed with actual curricula changes, like classes and/or dissertation support aiming to cultivate a comprehensive specialization in DuBois and Fanon equal to that of white figures like Kant, Hegel, or Dewey, or followed by the hiring of Black faculty (even in the cases with one professor—it is usually just that one expected to teach all of Africana philosophy and European traditions as well) with specializations on these figures once the deficiency in Africana philosophy is recognized. As dissatisfaction grows with the inculcated chimeras of pluralism and diversity in philosophy, the Black graduate student is warned that their “growing anger,” and “radicality,” not only threatens their careers, but their matriculation. This repressive apparatus (the doctorate) is used to wed the Black philosopher to their duty as a philosophical thinker on race—which is to gradually change (by moral appeal) how whites think about Blacks. In other words, the Black philosopher is recognized not as race theorist, but racial therapist by sanction.

Perhaps the direst consequence of philosophy’s racism on the Black mind is the Black philosopher’s obsessive hope in the redemptive character of white innocence; or what Joe Feagin has described in our conversations as “white virtue.” Because racism is understood to be a “mistaken idea” held by ignorance, academic philosophy maintains that Black philosophers arguing with and talking to whites, even dead whites through their scholarship, uncovers the virtuous purity and innocence of white reason. Accepting that whites can and have changed as a result of integration and the desegregation of the academy is made into a professional prerequisite. Almost a decade before Derrick Bell introduced what would come to be known as his racial realist thesis, Robert F. Williams, author of Negroes with Guns, argued in that work that:

The stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor’s conscience… We have come to comprehend the nature of racism. It is a mass psychosis…the logical inventions of a thoroughly diseased mind. The racist is a man crazed by hysteria at the idea of coming into equal human contact with Negroes. And this mass mental illness called racism is very much a part of the “American way of life (p.110-111).

A rigorous study of American racism marks history through the endurance of epochs, not differences between generations, where the conscious realization of America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow and domestic colonization stems from the civilizational motif solidified by the teleological continuity of empire, not the idealized hope that white colonizers instilled in their progeny the ideas to overthrow their own economic, political, and military superiority over the world. In other words, the descendants of whites carry with them the aspirations for, not the aversion to, the legacies of their colonial parents.

Thinking Black: Derrick Bell and the Living of a Racial Realist Life.

• • African Americans, law, racism, social justice, systemic racism, white supremacists, whiteness, whites

The Negro, in the universities and colleges of Europe and America, has to do his thinking and his reading in…the white man’s language…Our environment makes us think white, and some of us think white so persistently that we haven’t the time to think Black. I urge upon you…to help, with voice and pen, to hasten the coming of the morning when Negroes all over this broad land will wake up to the importance of thinking Black. (John Edward Bruce—“The Importance of Thinking Black”—1917}

The academic production of “race theory” is itself fraught with a dishonesty that few care to admit. To speak about race without attending to the very real social, economic, and political consequences of racism, says Barbara J. Fields in “[w]hiteness, Racism and Identity,” is to afford whites a symmetrical parity in our academic discourse that not only contradicts reality, but exposes the very content of our academically approved “race theory” to be little more than the careful arrangement of euphemisms taught to us by our white oppressors to obscure the deliberate machinations of racism. The life of Derrick Bell stands in sharp contrast to this practice, as only a life lived with Black people in mind can. His body of work is not only a testament to John E. Bruce’s call, but a literature that shames, even today, our irreconcilable attempts to rationalize our cowardice and maintain détente with white racists, despite their tyrannical reign throughout the university and in American society.

It is standard practice of scholars to honor their intellectual fore-parents who have been caste into the shadows of history, we eulogize their memories and praise their life’s work as a goal to which we should all aspire, but Derrick Bell’s life is the stuff “Black thought” is made of and resists such “fluffy-ization.” Derrick’s courage rang with the testament of Black thinkers from beginning to end. When I dared to suggest back in October of 2007 that philosophers were trying to make sense of his work next to Marx and Nietzsche, he told me that he considered himself

the academic counterpart of Errol Garner, the late jazz pianist from my hometown, Pittsburgh, who never learned to read music fearing, as I understand it, that it would ruin his style. I think there must be value in Marxist and other writings, but I did not really read them in college and have had little time since. I am writing this in Pittsburgh where I have been celebrating my 50th law school reunion from Pitt Law School. I do care more about the thought and writings and actions of Du Bois, Robeson, Douglass, et al. I think during my talk at UCLA, I read from the 1935 essay by Ralph Bunche about the futility of using law to overcome racism. It made more sense than so much of the theoretical writings on law, past and present, that I can barely understand and have great difficulty connecting with my experience. And you are right. At almost 77, I do not care to write in ways that whites can vindicate.

Throughout our many exchanges concerning his thought, Derrick remained convinced that attacking racism, the deliberate system of social, political, and legal subjugation of Black people, was the task of the Black Intellectual. He believed whole-heartedly that equality, even under Obama, was little more than illusion. In a speech he sent me entitled “On Celebrating an Election as Racial Progress,” he said that

every aspect of Barack Obama’s election and Inauguration has been covered like a heavy rain on a parched landscape. His taking office as the first black president is deemed a racial breakthrough….[but], in our celebrations, we should not confuse progress with fortuity, as we have while celebrating so many earlier unique moments that appeared to signal significant racial advances.

As early as 1976, Derrick Bell had already formulated the basis of his now famous racial realist thesis—the idea that

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than ‘temporary peaks of progress,’ short lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance”—in the realization that “white self-interest will prevail over [B]lack rights.

Following the teachings of his mentor Robert L. Carter, Bell understood well that integration offered Blacks nothing but proclamations of equality without daring to question the white supremacist organization of society. While the Black bourgeois continue to market  the suffering of poor, disenfranchised, brutalized and terrorized Black people as a means to gain visibility and compassion from white gatekeepers, Bell lived a life that demonstrated struggle amidst the permanence of white supremacy, not because he believed in a “mythical hope” in whites’ moral character, but because he saw Afrolantica and knew just as his hero Paul Robeson that Blacks could create a world here in America unseen by the tyrannical gaze of whites and unrecognizable to those who simply cannot “THINK BLACK.”

I will always remain grateful for his friendship; his time, and his patience in helping me understand the totality of his thought while writing my dissertation on his work. He has certainly earned his place at the table of our ancestors. To his remembrance.

Professor Curry teaches and researches philosophy at Texas A&M University