Under-MAN: A Genre Analysis of the Ethnological and Psycho-analytic Demonization of the Black Male

Contemporary social psychology has improved upon early 20th psychoanalytic accounts of racism and threat construction. Contrary to contemporary intersectional theory, which posits racial maleness as a prototypical and privileged social identity, numerous social psychological studies have found that maleness is the primary designator of outgroup identification among racial groups. Said differently, racial animus is generated from the construction of racialized men as biological, sexual, and cultural threats to racial groups, specifically the women of the dominant racial group. A substantial body of research suggests among social dominance theorists, social psychologists, and genocide scholars indicates that racialized maleness is necessarily tied to dehumanization and drives toward lethal extermination. 

This presentation traces difference—within the register of the dehumanized—in our conceptualization of the Black male. My research indicates that the ethnological sciences was not simply rooted in phenotypical distinctions, but a sex-based demonology whereby the Black male indicated the evolutionary and cosmological basis of racial difference. This caricature structured E. Franklin Frazier’s sociological pathologization and Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological analysis of the Black male as a figure constituted through phobic projection and civilizational unfitness. The examination of late 19^th and early 20^th century racial science supports the idea that the Black male represented a cosmogenic kind; a demonic entity unfit for Western civilization. As such, I propose a cosmogenic model of racial dehumanization based on the role evil has in the designation of Non-Being—or how the concept of the Man-Not illuminates a genus with this register of difference.

Speaker

Tommy J. Curry is Professor of Philosophy and holds a Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the first Black Professor of Philosophy in Scotland and in the University of Edinburgh’s history. Professor Curry served as co-chair of the Research and Engagement Working Group commissioned by the Principal of the University of Edinburgh to investigate the institution’s legacies of colonialism and slavery, and is a co-author of the Decolonizing Transformations Report (2025).

He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press, 2018), which won the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought.

His research examines anti-Black racism, anti-colonial resistance, and the sexual vulnerability of Black (racialized) males in Western societies. Professor Curry’s public intellectual work has been recognized with the Alain Locke Award for Public Philosophy, and earlier in his career he was named among the top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States.

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Organiser

School of History, Religion and Philosophies, SOAS History Seminar Series.

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