Episode 116: Tommy Curry discusses black male studies
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What is the introductory framing of oppression in the episode?
Hi, I'm Caroline Wall. I'm an alumna of the University of Chicago, and I work on Elucidation's podcast. When we think about oppression, there's a temptation to think about it in terms of axes. On the x-axis, you have gender, where on the one hand you have men who are part of the patriarchy, the ruling class, and on the other end you have women, the victims of the patriarchy, being ruled in this way. And on your y-axis, you have race, with white people on one end as the oppressors and people of color on the other end as the oppressed. And if you use this image to conceptualize oppression, you might draw the conclusion white men are the most oppressive class, black women are the most oppressed class, and everyone else is somewhere in between based on where they fall on each gradient.
Tommy Curry rejects this conceptualization as simply false, both historically and in the present. Currie is a professor of Africana philosophy and blackmail studies at the University of Edinburgh. Blackmail studies is a new interdisciplinary field that Currie has established and advanced throughout his career. In today's episode of Elucidations, we're going to discuss what this X and Y axis picture gets wrong. We talk about the history of suffrage and the discourses surrounding it, the place of white women in a colonial and imperialist structure of power, and how despite being oppressed by the patriarchy, black men have been labeled a part of it, which Currie calls an ahistorical sleight of hand.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Music
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Tommy Curry, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, and he's here to discuss black male studies. Tommy Curry, welcome.
Thank you.
So I think a pretty common default assumption in today's day and age is that being a man comes with a certain amount of privilege. You have certain social privileges that you can wield over women if you're a man. But, of course, a lot of people have talked about how things become a little bit less straightforward than that when you look at the difference between being a white man versus being, for example, a black man or an East Asian man or different kinds of men. What would be an example of how the power dynamic changes if you're looking at a black man interacting with a white woman versus a white man interacting with a white woman?
Well, there's lots of different things that change the relationships that men have. I think one of the weaknesses of feminism and our study of gender in the United States is that it lacks the nuance and specificity of what it means when it talks about privilege. So when you look at the work from R.W.S. Connell, for instance, you see a division in the kinds of masculinity that exists within a given society. Hegemonic masculinity is an ideological form of the ideas men should strive to because they control things like wages and property taxes and politics. It's a form of masculinity that doesn't need brute force or physical violence to make itself popular or to make itself well known or to make itself present in the world.
Subordinate masculinity, however, does not have that kind of power. Someone who is poor, someone who is black, someone who is ethnic or immigrant or migrant. These kinds of masculinities are marginalized in a given society, largely because they're outside of the ruling class dynamics. In the United States, there's a view of manhood or maleness or masculinity, whatever term that you prefer. that insists that simply by having the body, the biological body of a man, that society values you more. But when you put that into relationship with something like white women, the history of racialized men next to white women has largely been one of the rapists or the deviant. There's images that go back to the mid-19th century that depicts racialized men, be they immigrants or even Asians around the turn of the century, that suggest that they're coming to rape white women.
So, if you ignore the fact that history has been full of ways in which racialized men have been made inferior to white women, have been constructed as threats to white women, have been kept away, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the introductory framing of oppression in the episode?
0:00–10:49
2
How does Tommy Curry challenge the gender‑race axis model of oppression?
10:49–13:40
3
Why does Curry argue that “male privilege” is not universal for Black men?
13:40–18:32
4
What is the difference between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities?
18:32–24:27
5
How have historical narratives portrayed Black men as threats to white women?
24:27–29:31
6
What empirical data shows Black men are disadvantaged compared to White women?
29:31–36:20
7
Why does Curry say mainstream feminism overlooks Black male experiences?
36:20–58:48
8
What future steps does Curry propose for Black Male Studies and gender theory?
58:48–59:19
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