The Man-Not
A book review on Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry
The propaganda that has been used by everyone from government officials and mainstream media turned propaganda mouthpieces like the BBC to nagging strangers on social media is the repetitive use of raped women and beheaded babies. However, despite the White House having to walk back Biden’s claims that he saw children beheaded by Hamas, one must wonder why this trope is constantly returned to. Is this a singular case of delusion or a larger pattern of hysteria?
On the other side, when reports of the human losses in Gaza, the facts reiterated continuously about the deaths of women and children. Are men not human? Propaganda will insist that the infiltration of Hamas is so insidious, so dangerous, as if acting like a permanent sleeper cell or some sort of virus that is impossible to distinguish; we must, therefore, rely on without impunity, genocide.
To analyze the structures of this logic, Tommy J. Curry’s 2017 book “The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood” provides a study worthy of consideration.
Curry provides a well-researched study from historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism, including Black feminism, does not yet fully understand the role of homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability in the deaths and lives of Black males. From this structural analysis, looking at the parallels extended onto a global structure and how the western imperial empire relates to modern-day Palestinians is interesting.
We now look at the Jim Crow era of segregation and Apartheid South Africa with disdain, yet what has happened in Gaza and the West Bank is a genocide set at a new level that is incomparable.
Curry chose George Junius Stinney Jr. for the cover of the book; he was 14 years old when he was wrongfully convicted in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial but nevertheless executed for the murders of two white girls in March 1944. He was executed by electric chair in June 1944 and was the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century.
Since October 7th, 2023, there has been a collective punishment, or rather, collective execution of Palestinians in Gaza, which stemmed from the atrocities of alleged raping and beheadings of Israeli children.
Curry states, “the idea of Black males as rapists started post-emancipation. The argument of white ethnologists and suffragettes alike was that the Black male was a threat to the womanhood of the white race and need to be exterminated to ensure the survival of the white republic. Specifically at the turn of the 20th century, white sexologists like William Lee Howard argued that at puberty all mental development of the Black male ceases and he becomes a rapist. George Stinney Jr. was an innocent victim of this ethnological thinking in the 1940s…a boy, a child, framed and seen by this society as a rapist despite the impossibility of him committing such an act. Furthermore, I document how the court had evidence clearing Mr. Stinney Jr. of the crime and choose not to reveal it to the jury. This is an example of what I call characterological defect and the burden that all Black men suffer in racist patriarchal societies. What I am suggesting to Black men in presenting Mr. Stinney Jr. to the world is that the world does not see us as boys, will not recognize us as men, but will only see us as the rapist and in need of death to protect the order of society.”
The book explores the propagation of the Super-predator Mythology. In November 2023, Biden announced that he would seek “an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense” of $14.3 billion. If we are without our Super-predators, who could we possibly use the laser-guided weapons of mass destruction on?
If we extend this analysis to examine the global context of colonization, what is the order of society that we are attempting to protect? And how are we to face the problems of tomorrow if we have not understood appropriately the lessons of yesterday, as we continue to perpetrate them, today?
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry was published in June 2017 by Temple University Press.
Wow. This is both terrifying and intriguing as a line of inquiry regarding the rationale used by aggressors for separating "men" from "women and children," especially when invoking this distinction is intended to incite fear and a thirst for vengeance in the general public. I have thought before about this tactic of focusing on "women and children" - those people who are culturally assumed to be 1) helpless and vulnerable, and therefore more likely to invoke both the the sympathy and the collective moral outrage of strangers, and 2) the property of those in power, and therefore more likely to invoke a false sense of personal affront to the collective "owners" of those actually or allegedly attacked. Adding in the awareness you are reflecting on here, of how cultural attitudes and assumptions about Black males (whether cast as "children" or "rapists") are twisted and distorted to serve the dominant narrative, adds a horrific level of complexity to this systematized dehumanization that makes all the more clear (though it was already plenty clear) that this is really about the use of, rather than concern for or protection of, all BIPOC within white-sypremacist countries, as dehumanized props in whatever story serves the purpose of those with the power to frame and guide the narrative. White men are seen as either fierce and noble protectors, whose violent aggression is excused by invoking the poor, victimized white women and children, or they are victims themselves, who have been robbed of the women and children who belonged to them. Meanwhile Black men are not men - not even human - but rapists, so dangerous that their justified execution both excuses and distracts from the harm also caused to Black women and children - white ownership of (or at the very least, control over) whom can then be further justified by white patriarchy, due to the assumed lack of any suitable Black men to take on the role as "owners" of their women and children. It seems like an inevitable further horrible step in this strategy of defining then, that interracial sexual encounters that resulted in offspring would be deemed much more vile, by white supremacist and patriarchal standards, when the mother is white because the child unquestionably comes from that mother and is considered tainted, and came into being without the consent or control of any white man. Whereas if the father is white, he gets to make a decision whether or not to claim ownership of a racially mixed child. A Black man fathering a child with a white woman is viewed as an act of predation, while a white man fathering a child with a Black woman is viewed as, at worst, an unfortunate side effect of the white man exercising his god-given right to make whatever use he sees fit of the people who are seen to exist for that very purpose. Thank you for reviewing this book, as it seems a necessary next step on exploring the complex consequences of intersecting white supremacy, colonialism/imperialusm, and patriarchy.