The Man-Not and the Inapplicability of Intersectionality to the Dilemmas of Black Manhood

The Man-Not and the Theorizing of Black Male Death and Dying

It was a common saying among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a “nigger,” and a half-cent to bury one.

In his path-breaking book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, Curry (2017a) argues for the necessity of a theoretical framework that will grapple with the suffering, pain, and death of Black boys and men as an existential problem that is largely ignored in gender studies. Curry (2017a) opens the book with the following statements:

I see dead Black male bodies, Black men and boys, in the streets. Dead Niggers made into YouTube sensations I see their executions on the Internet: the corpses of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, little Tamir Rice cycled for eternity . . . I know as I write this that another Black man or boy will die. I know as I think about their deaths, the end of their lives is coming to be. This America makes corpses of Black males. It is simply the reality of our day that Black males die. This death, however, is shunned, cast out of the halls of the university, and avoided at all costs by disciplines (Curry, 2017a, p. 1).

This assertion, “American makes corpses of Black males,” in the string of statements above, draws attention to one of the cardinal themes in The Man-Not which concerns the omnipresence of Black male disposability within post-reconstruction America where institutional forces continue to kill and decimate Black males at a disproportionate rate, compared with any other group. In America’s criminal justice system, there is an extraordinary disproportionate mistreatment of Black boys and men. In fact, Black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than White men. Between 2010 and 2012, Black boys aged 15 through 19 were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million compared with 1.47 per million for White boys of the same age group (Davis, 2017). This reality of Black male death as well as sexualized violence, that is imposed by institutional forces on Black bodies, is what Curry grapples with in The Man-Not as both an existential crisis and a serious social problem which continues to escape feminist-inspired scholarship on masculinity and genderized oppression. Jones (2017) situates police violence against persons of color in a historical context, suggesting that the current wave of killings replicates historical trends, especially the brutal violence of bodily mutilation and lynchings during the Jim Crow era in America. He also discountenances the view which holds that the underlying and recurring explanation for police violence against Black males is as a result of stereotypical racial attitudes and their behavioral consequences. In his view, much evidence as to why the police continue to use fatal force against Black males has accumulated suggestions that these out-group males may be disconnected from, or at least marginalized in, the community of human beings—labeled infrahumanization—a view of dehumanization that has historically linked Blacks of African descent to apes (Jones, 2017).

In a similar vein, Curry (2017a, 2017b, 2018) and Curry and Utley (2018) insist that the death and dying, including the sexual discrimination of Black males, have been ignored in disciplines within the academia, especially in gender studies and the feminist discourses utilizing intersectionality as its theoretical frame of reference. In such feminist-intersectional analysis, “theories concerning Black masculinity revolve around a fixed political idea in the United States that is deemed progressive by the extent to which it is sufficiently feminist and deemed patriarchal by the extent to which it is not” (Curry, 2017a, p. 3). It is from this vantage point that such feminist theoretical frameworks promote a particularized depiction of Black males as hegemonic, hyper-masculine, and patriarchal—especially relegated to the zone of toxic masculinity. In this instance, “hypermasculinity” is proposed as the phylogenic marker of Black maleness. It is the very basis for constructing what it means to be “Black” and “male.” Consequently, Black males are thought to be the exemplifications of White (bourgeois) masculinity’s pathological excess. In other words, the toxic abnormality of a hegemonic White masculinity becomes the conceptual norm for Black men and boys (Curry, 2017a; Ogungbure, 2018; Ogungbure, 2019b). The implication of this stereotypical narrative within gender studies and the theory of intersectionality is the essentialist portrayal or caricature of the Black male as something that he is not, or more appropriately characterized as the “man that he is not”—The man-not. Thus, this negative imagery and caricaturized portrayal of Black males, that serves as theory in the academic disciplines and valorized gender theories like intersectionality, fundamentally contributes to the death and dying of Black males because it further bolsters the myth that Black males are dangerous brutes that deserve to be tamed, mostly through death and dying.

But I Ain’t One of the Boys: Intersectionality’s Black Male Problem

The abuse of [B]lack males is so well rationalized to be invisible.

In most feminist literatures, Kimberlé Crenshaw is credited as one of the progenitors of the theory of intersectionality. It is a generally accepted view that this theory was first formulated in Crenshaw (1989) - her seminal essay. Here, Crenshaw draws from a legal case surrounding Title VII and employment disputes between some Black employees at General Motors, to build an intersectional theory that emphasizes the salience of Black women’s experiences in terms of the combined axis of racial and sexual discrimination which were defined, respectively, by White women’s and Black men’s experiences (Crenshaw, 1989). In her view, because the Court argues (following the suit that was brought by the plaintiff against the defendant in this case) that the goal of Title VII was not “to create a new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a [B]lack male,” this amounts to a discrimination on the basis of sex/and race for the Black woman (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 142). It is difficult to determine how Crenshaw arrived at this conclusion given the facts of the case that informed the Court’s opinion. As the official briefs of the case reveals, the Court’s opinion was based on the facts of the suit brought against General Motors, which was centered on discrimination on the basis of race and not sex. ¹ The Court fillings in this case indicated that

[p]laintiffs brought this suit alleging that defendants discriminated against them on account of their race, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a), and [that General Motors] retaliated against them due to their protests of the defendants’ unlawful discriminatory practices, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3. ²

Thus, the Court made its conclusions based on the findings on the facts of the case brought before it, and the conclusions of the existing law(s) guiding such facts. So, the critique Crenshaw levels against the Court for being “sexist” is an extrapolation that deviates from the facts of the case in question; the thrust of the analogy that the Court draws between Black men and Black women (upon which Crenshaw formulated her theory of intersectionality) was to emphasize the Black race as a homogeneous group on the basis of race which was at the heart of the legal dispute.

What Crenshaw hopes to achieve with her preferred interpretation of the Court’s decision in this case is to show how, with Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent, the ways by which dominant conceptions of discrimination condition people to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. From this assumptive logic, she suggests further that this single-axis framework of analysis erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification, and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). By implication, Crenshaw’s interpretation of the court’s decision portrays Black men as “privileged” members of the Black race because of their “maleness” which shields them from sex-based discrimination. The inevitable conclusion that follows from such logic is that while Black men can be victimized on the basis of their race, they cannot be victimized on the basis of their sex. Under this frame of reference, the “male-sex” symbol becomes the marker of privilege in the organization of society. It does not really matter that Crenshaw merely arrives at this opinion from a Court’s decision regarding race-based employment discrimination and Title VII. Also, this claim was not grounded on any empirical study aimed at determining the axes of oppression—race, sex, and class, between Black men and women within America’s patriarchal and capitalist economic system. Although, Crenshaw articulates her opposition to a single-axis analysis of the dynamics of oppression, she commits this same shortcoming by centering her analysis singularly on Black women. A few years after the publication of her initial essay, Crenshaw pens a follow-up essay titled, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” consolidating her arguments for intersectionality as a theoretical framework for analyzing Black women’s experiences. In this latter essay, she argues that “in the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experiences is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242). So, in “Mapping the Margins,” she adds class analysis to her earlier intersectional analysis of sex and race dimensions.

However, the fundamental problem with the theory of intersectionality consists of its presumptive ascription of male privilege to Black males. Herein lies intersectionality’s Black male problem. This is the erroneous idea that Black men and boys are excluded from sexual discrimination because they share the generic markers of privilege in popular gender theory, which consists of their biosocial identity—as male. When feminist/intersectional theories project such hegemonic masculine characteristics unto Black male bodies, they invariably stereotype Black males as macho men (mimicking White dominant, patriarchal males), which then erases any possibility of envisioning and articulating the discriminatory sexual experience of Black males. In the The Man-Not, Curry provides an elaborate denunciation of intersectionality as a dangerously prejudiced gender/feminist theory against Black males because within this theory,

the Black male is thought to be empowered by his maleness and the nuance and care needed to understand his peculiarity are consequently neglected, the Black male has been the most ignored subject in the attempt to pluralize identities intersectionality. Seemingly, feminists can use intersectionality to study Black and white women and white men in the dawning field of masculinity studies, while Black men and boys fall victim to a moral moratorium insisting that they can be studied only as mimetic subjects always in danger of perpetuating in patriarchy. (Curry, 2017a. p. 141)

Curry further articulates his grouse with intersectional theory by arguing that some intersectionality theorists asserts that Black males have privilege and advantages over Black women because they are male; others suggest that while Black men are shown to be the greatest victims of incarceration and police brutality, the attention to their suffering excludes the suffering of Black women, as well as that of Black gay and lesbian groups (Curry, 2017a).

Utilizing such a paradigm to describe the axes of oppression plays on the common, albeit conceptually faulty, imagination that perpetrators of oppression are male (all males, including subordinate males like Black males) and all the victims are women (including hegemonic/dominant White females). Such is the (il)logic of intersectionality. Curry (2017a) exposes the illogic of intersectionality in this manner:

under the intersectional frame, to say that the female is subordinated on the basis of sex presumes the sameness of men, because the Black male, like the white male, does not suffer from sexual subordination . . . at the level of identity, the Black male, in his exception as male, is found to enjoy the privilege of not being “sexed” and therefore not vulnerable like the female. (p. 210)

The upshot of Curry’s argument is that Black males are non-hegemonic males and that contrary to the depiction of the theory of intersectionality, they are vulnerable to sex-based discrimination (including rape) and death. Notwithstanding the fact that in The Man-Not, Curry draws attention to the misrepresentation and mischaracterization of Black males in gender theory including intersectionality, Táíwò (2018) brazenly argues that Curry’s work ought to be regarded as a work of intersectionality—perhaps a different kind of intersectionality theory from the kinds Curry profoundly censures in his book. As Táíwò (2018, p. 8) avows, “against the advice of the text itself, I read The Man-Not as a work of intersectional theory.” In what follows, I show how the insistence of Táíwò (2018) to characterize this book as a work of intersectionality amounts to a misreading of the thrust of Curry’s criticism of intersectionality thereby undermining the philosophical significance of The Man-Not.

In his analysis, Táíwò (2018) side-steps what Curry identifies as intersectional theory’s Black male problem—a cardinal defect of the theory to introduce some kind of “personality politics” dimension to the dispute by raising the following question: “[d]oes Curry have a dispute with intersectionality theorists or with intersectionality theory?” (Táíwò, 2018, p. 8). On one hand, this question reduces the painstaking critiques that Curry (2017a) lays out in his book, to merely a personality gripe with certain intersectional theorists. Yet, the discourse of philosophy itself thrives on disagreement both personal and ideological. While personality politics is desirable, genuine systematic intellectual progress is possible only if there is careful attention to problems of evidence, inference, and conceptualization (Greenstein, 1992). A careful reading of The Man-Not would reveal that this is a moot point—Curry’s disputation centers on the substance of intersectionality as a theoretical formulation including the purveyors of such theoretical positions. On the other hand, this question signifies the deployment of an analytical-metaphysical approach to philosophical analysis by Táíwò (2018) in an attempt to disconnect the theorist from the theory, in terms of mind–body split. To follow such analytic logic to its logical conclusion, intersectional theorists would perhaps be deemed as capable of disembodied theorizing. Just as it is difficult to think of a disembodied existence in the physical world, it is also difficult to conceive of a disembodied theorizing of intersectionality in the material world. It appears that Táíwò (2018) made this analytic move here to signify a defense of version(s) of intersectionality which he claims are different from the kind Curry (2017a) critically engages with in his book. According to Táíwò (2018), this is the kind in which “some intersectionality theorists have themselves noticed this genre of complication [the kind Curry criticizes] and responded to it, and as such don’t seem to advocate claims quite as strong as the ones Curry attributes to the group” (Táíwò, 2018, p. 9). However, the problem with this attempted defense of intersectionality is that it fails to address the Black male problem that emanates from the fundamental assumptions of the theory of intersectionality.

For instance, Táíwò (2018) claims that Cho, in a co-authored essay with Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “explicitly denies that Black women are the only ones who intersectionality can apply to” (Táíwò, 2018, p. 9). But this claim runs contrary to what Cho et al. (2013) seem to suggest. In this particular essay, while the authors made an appeal to a wider use of intersectionality as a field of studies, they also acknowledged its fundamental weakness which, in their view,

revolve around intersectionality’s capacity to do any work other than to call attention to the particularities of Black women. The historical centrality of American Black women and Black feminism as subjects of intersectionality theory grounds reservations about intersectionality’s usefulness as an analytic tool in addressing other marginalized communities and other manifestations of social power. (p. 788)

Rather than read this as a denial of the theory’s central flaw, I think a more accurate reading shows that they intended to acknowledge this flaw as way of rehabilitating the theory. But even if this is granted, mere denial or acknowledgment of this cardinal flaw in the theory does not suffice to address the Black male problem. There is nowhere in this attempted rehabilitation of the theory where the discrimination of Black males on the basis of intersecting axes of oppression like race, sex, and class was discussed. Thus, even this attempt at rehabilitating the theory of intersectionality does not address the Black male problem that constitutes the crux of Curry’s indictment of the theory.

In a similar fashion, following Cho et al. (2013), Táíwò (2018) argues that the characterization of intersectionality as an analytic “sensibility” or “disposition” should make us be more concerned with what intersectionality does than what it says, which then allows for a broad application of the theory to previously excluded groups like the Black males who have been historically discriminated against in the United States. But the mere fact that Táíwò (2018) accepts intersectionality as an “analytic theory” with a broad appeal still does not address the harmful things that intersectional theory does to the existence of Black males. Intersectionality has done a lot to complicate how Black men are seen politically, socially, and economically in relation to Black women and other marginalized groups in the United States. As a result, the engagement of Táíwò (2018) with intersectionality as a generalized analytic category to be applied to the dilemmas of Black manhood is unsuccessful. Especially as Curry (2017a) notes,

the actual deaths of Black men and boys shown to us publicly are found consistently to exceed the categorical limits imposed on Black masculinity through the category of “race” and denied under the category of gender. The categorical abstractions of race, class, and gender used to analyze (and, most worryingly, decide what is perceived or able to be interpreted concerning) Black masculinity deny the sexual motivation behind racist violence against Black males (p. 146).

It is not enough to accept a theory like intersectionality as a universal, normative, axiomatic, or nomological tool for analyzing oppression and functional aspects of structural violence and discrimination; we need to subject our own predilections toward such a theory or such “tool” to rigorous questioning: What is it about the theory of intersectionality as a “tool” that deserves our defending even though this theory continues to have pernicious life and death outcomes for Black males in the society today? Especially considering the fact that this “tool” or theory characterize Black men and boys as what they are not or the men are not—The man-not. But Táíwò (2018, p. 9) would have us believe that “the dispute is less about the tools themselves and more about what they are used to do.” Conceiving intersectional theory as “tools” in this instance does not take into cognizance the fact that conceptual tools are not value-neutral but value-laden.

Intersectionality is a theory or “tool” that is infused with a definitive political agenda that essentializes identities such as “Blackness,” “womanhood,” and “working classness” as the fundamental categories of oppression (Carbado & Harris, 2019; Mirza, 2014; Tomlinso, 2019). As Yuval-Davis (2006) notes, the attempt to essentialize “Blackness” or “womanhood” or “working classness” as specific forms of concrete oppression in additive ways inevitably conflates narratives of identity politics with descriptions to positionality as well as constructing identities within the terms of specific political projects. Such narratives often reflect hegemonic discourses of identity politics that render invisible experiences of the more marginal members of that specific social category and construct a homogenized “right way” to be its member. This explains why Orelus (2010) inveighs that studies on gender, including intersectionality, have focused on the socially constructed binary between men and women—while showing how women have suffered from sexism, they have failed to examine in depth how men have also suffered from it.

Consequently, Curry rightly argued in The Man-Not that the theory of intersectionality is entirely useless to talk about or conceptualize Black male sexual vulnerability and racial discrimination and cannot be salvaged in any form or manner, contrary to the proposition of Táíwò (2018). In a bid to provide a defense of intersectionality against the incisive and devastating criticisms that Curry puts up against intersectional theory, Táíwò (2018) completely misjudges the overarching philosophical significance of The Man-Not, which apart from counteracting hegemonic, caricaturized, and stereotypical portrayals of Black males in gender theory, including intersectionality, focuses on a creation of a new theoretical lens for conceptualizing the sexual victimization, vulnerabilities, and death of Black men and boys within an American society, replete with anti-Black misandry and racialized violence. As a way of addressing this dilemma created for Black male existence by gender theory and intersectionality, Curry argues that “Black males desperately need new ideas to account for the violence (economic, political, and industrial) that turns Black men and boys into corpses” (Curry, 2017a, p. 130). One of such new ideas is what Tommy now proposes as “The Theory of Phallicism.”

The Theory of Phallicism: Toward a Study of the Sexual Discrimination and Death of Black Males

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Contemporary gender theory and feminist narratives including the theory of intersectionality continue to propagate toxic notions and stereotypes about Black males as pathological, regressive, or sexual predators, while also promoting such perspectives as definitive or “analytical” and acceptable theoretical lens for cataloging the lived experience of Black men and boys (Curry, 2019; Foston, 2003; Hilsa & Vanatta, 2019; Tomlinso, 2019). This, consequently, makes it impossible to account for their sexual vulnerability within a social praxis permeated by racialized and patriarchal forms of violence. Since Black males are constructed or caricaturized within such theoretical lens as “hegemonic” and as primary perpetrators of violence, it becomes extremely difficult to account for their vulnerabilities under such imaginary. Thus, the theory of phallicism takes Black male vulnerability seriously by centering their death and dying as well as their sexual exploitation in its framework of analysis, whereas intersectionality’s centering of the Black woman as sexually vulnerable, and as the symbolic representation of race/sex, and the violence of rape and domestic abuse, by consequence, exclude Black males from being seen as vulnerable (Curry, 2017a). In other words, intersectionality does “not see” Black male death and their sexual vulnerability as categories of gendered and racialized oppression that deserves serious intellectual attention. This is why Curry (2007a) writes thus:

Why does theory “not see” the sexual vulnerability [and death] of the Black male? What is it about the Black phallus—its historical vulnerability to excision—that cultivates indifference or, worse yet, an expected apathy? Because Black male death is made generic, non-gendered, it is thought to be ontologically irrelevant. Because it is encapsulated within the category of race and understood as the violence to which all raced bodies are subjected, Black male death fails to designate a specificity within our present theoretical disciplinary order. (p. 164)

It is this exclusion of the plight of the Black male from theoretical consideration in the discourse of gender and sexuality that necessitates the turn toward the theory of phallicism—a turn toward a “genre” study of Black male’s sexual and racial discrimination, including Black male death. This signifies the broader philosophical significance of The Man-Not. As Curry (2017a) writes in the epilogue of the text,

This book is written to serve as a basis for a new kind of study that engages Black males beyond the threats, they are assumed to be, and the phobias imposed on them. This book not only endeavors to think differently about Black men and boys; it endeavors to establish a genuine theoretical orientation to their study. (p. 233)

Herein lies the upshot of phallicism as theory that surveys the sexual discrimination and death of Black males within a militarized police state that constantly subject such bodies to violence and brutalization.

In his recent work, Curry (2018) takes up this task by building upon the arguments from The Man-Not to advance this new theory of phallicism:

Phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated racialized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be a sexual threat and predatory, and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group. This concept is meant to guide a seemingly inexplicable tension if not contradiction between the description of racialized males under repressive and murderous regimes and their hyper-sexualization as objects of desire, possession, and want. The racialized male is conceptualized as the substantive (social) meaning of rape, while simultaneously being subjugated to rape by both the male and female members of the dominant group who disown their sexual violence because the hypervisibility of the racialized male is only as the rapist. (p. 31)

The racialized male thesis which lies at the heart of the theory of Phallicism can be traced to the subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH) in Social Dominance Theory (SDT). Social Dominance Theory, developed by Sidanius and Pratto (1999), begins with the basic observation that all human societies tend to be structured as systems of group-based social hierarchies. At the very minimum, this hierarchical social structure consists of one or a small number of dominant and hegemonic groups at the top and one or a number of subordinate groups at the bottom. The fundamental suppositions of SDT was derived from an earlier study conducted by Berghe (1975), which presents a biosocial view of the world and man’s (dominant in-group males) attempt to dominate all that is within it. According to Berghe (1975, p. 94),

all human societies are stratified at least on the basis of age and sex, as are, indeed, most higher primate societies. Men (White men) dominate women, and adults dominate children, a hierarchical order evident in the human family, the smallest and most universal form of human social organization.

Using the American society as a foil, Berghe (1975) further expands on how race classification changes the nature of social hierarchies between Whites and Blacks especially noting that Blacks or “Africans” were excluded from the human family as not-men, and as such unable to participate in such hegemonic forms of domination because most Americans (including American liberaltarians who were slave owners) “never seriously believed that their human chattel was endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights. Africans [Blacks], somehow, were not quite people” (Berghe, 1975, p. 93). What this goes to show is that historically, Black males have not and cannot mimic or wield the power of patriarchy that feminist theories and narratives ascribe to them.

Sidanius and Pratto (1999) further expounds on why Black males could not be deemed as “dominant patriarchs” based on the negative social values that are ascribed to members of the subordinate groups. Among other things, the dominant group is characterized by its possession of a disproportionately large share of positive social value, or all those material and symbolic things for which people strive. Examples of positive social value are such things as political authority and power, good and plentiful food, splendid homes, the best available health care, wealth, and high social status. While subdominant groups possess a disproportionately large share of negative social value, including such things as low power and social status, high-risk and low-status occupations, relatively poor health care, poor food, modest or miserable homes, and severe negative sanctions (e.g., prison and death sentences; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, pp. 31–32). On the SDT model, group-based social hierarchy are collapsed into three: (a) an age system, in which adults and middle-age people have disproportionate social power over children and younger adults, (b) a gender system in which males have disproportionate social and political power compared with females (patriarchy), and (c) what they labeled an arbitrary-set system. The arbitrary-set system is filled with socially constructed and highly salient groups based on characteristics such as clan, ethnicity, estate, nation, race, caste, social class, religious sect, regional grouping, or any other socially relevant group distinction that the human imagination is capable of constructing (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

These scholars also maintained that because the arbitrary-set system involves any hierarchical schemes and forms of discrimination that the human mind can imagine, it makes this classification all the more vicious—it is by far, associated with the greatest degree of violence, brutality, and oppression designated as arbitrary-set discrimination (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Arbitrary-set hierarchies should be regarded as primarily a form of intrasexual competition. They are the result of aggressive male coalitions for the establishment and maintenance of exploitative and expropriative relations against other male coalitions. Because the precise make-up of these aggressive male coalitions is likely to be extremely flexible and contingent upon the exact situational and contextual conditions, these male coalitions are likely to be abstracted into the simple cognitive heuristic of “ingroups versus outgroups,” or “us versus them.” Furthermore, if arbitrary-set hierarchies are primarily male versus male projects, then various forms of arbitrary-set discrimination (e.g., racism, ethnocentrism) should be primarily directed against outgroup males rather than outgroup females. (Sidanius & Veniegas, 2000, p. 52)

What arbitrary-set systems under SDT shows is that subordinate males are subject to the racial, sexual, economic, political, and institutional violence (including death) perpetrated by dominant males. This is the thrust of the subordinate male target thesis (SMTH) which is propelled by several legitimizing myths. So, given the structural arrangements within patriarchal societies like the American society, Black males are primarily targeted by dominant White males to establish the domain of power and control and access to political authority and economic wealth. Thus, to legitimize such supremacy, power, and control, dominant White males (including dominant females) concoct and projects debasing myths about Black male bodies to justify the brutal forms of violence they subject such undesirable and unwanted bodies to. It is these same legitimizing myths that are used to justify the killing of Black males by agents of the state. Some common depictions of such myths about Black males in contemporary society include the description of Black males as thugs, hustlers, and law-breaking slicksters who were not to be trusted, and not worthy of equal treatment, or deserving of being marginalized and killed because they are a “menace to society.” Such characterizations or caricatures contribute to the development of a negative image that perpetuates widespread disdain for Black men and boys. This disdain, undergirded by an assumption of White supremacy, subsequently continues to affect the life chances and labor opportunities for Black males (Howard et al., 2012).

Thus, the theory of phallicism maintains that Black males are not and cannot be patriarchs (as intersectional theorists would have us believe) through the exposition of America’s group-based social hierarchies as centered on “whiteness” as the measure of manhood—a society where manhood rights and masculine powers confer power to rule and to subjugate on White dominant males (including dominant females). Under this system (often characterized as a system of civilization), White male power is portrayed as natural; male dominance and White supremacy are regarded as products of human evolutionary development. Affirming the manly power of the White man’s civilization was one of the most powerful ways middle-class men found to assert their interwoven racial, class, and gender dominance (Bederman, 1993). In “Freaks and the American ideal of manhood,” Baldwin (1998) commented on the violence that is engulfed in the American idea of masculinity—such that Black and other non-White males are met with brute violence. According to Baldwin (1998),

the American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one’s sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred [and is occurring] in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination. (pp. 815–816)

The Black male is peculiarly a target of violence and/or social control and this targeting of Black males is a symptom of a virus in the collective America thinking. The virus holds that such stereotypes are true—that Black males are really beasts (Jones, 2005). For Hilsa and Vanatta (2019), the appropriation of Black male bodies in this way reveals a framework of anti-Black male sentiment and the resulting negative architecture of race and place imposed upon Black male bodies.

The conclusions of Berghe (1978) also support the view that Black males cannot be patriarchs. Berghe (1978) argues from a sociobiological perspective that within such power structure based on (White) manhood, sexual exploitation is the inevitable concomitant of the situation of domination and it is the same system which characterizes American slavery. This system invariably leads to the sexual victimization and death of Black males, and it demonstrates why it is impossible for Black males to exhibit the kinds of “male privilege” that has been unduly ascribed to them by feminist theory and intersectionality. Although, widely popular in feminist discourses, many have taken to the narrative of “Black male privilege” without evidence. In his essay entitled, “Challenging the Myth of Black Male Privilege,” Johnson (2018) argues that the

assumptions that Black males harbor privilege can be problematic in that they assume “patriarchy” as a static institution that oppresses women and empowers males across race, class, and sexuality. Such thin analysis has uncritically branded males across all racial and socioeconomic indicators negatively without even questioning whether or not the notion has merit. (Johnson, 2018, pp. 21–22)

Feminist theories focusing on intersectional modalities of race, class, and gender also propagate and perpetuate such “legitimizing myths” about Black males as sexual predators, patriarchs, and social deviants as the hallmark of gender/Black masculinity scholarship. For instance, hooks (2004) portrayed Black males as proud of the discrimination imposed upon them by society as “a mark of distinction, as the edge that they have over white males” (hooks, 2004, p. 45). In an earlier work, hooks (1990) conceived such markers of discrimination like castration or emasculation as avenues for Black males to participate fully in patriarchy through the specter of sexism. In this work, she further depicted Black males as “privileged sexist” just as hegemonic/patriarchal White males. In her estimation,

Sexism has always been a political stance mediating racial domination, enabling white men and black men to share a common sensibility about sex roles and the importance of male domination. Clearly both groups have equated freedom with manhood, and manhood with the right of men to have indiscriminate access to the bodies of women. Both groups have been socialized to condone patriarchal affirmation of rape as an acceptable way to maintain male domination. (hooks, 1990, p. 59)

This idea of “maleness” as a unique identifier of domination is echoed in the writings of other feminist scholars like Mutua (2013), who described Black males as belonging to a “privileged group” because of their “maleness” which makes them guilty of the forms of violence perpetuated by dominant White males. Black feminists and intersectional theorists also refer to Black males as sexual predators using the legitimizing myths of the “super-masculine menial” (Mutua, 2013). These are the kinds of narrative about sexuality and dominance that put Black men and boys outside of the experience of sexual violence such as rape.

Yet Black males are being raped in contemporary society by White males welding institutional power. For instance, on February 2, 2017, a 22-year-old Black male named Théo was raped with a truncheon, which was forced into his rectum by four French police men in a brutal case of sexual violence. The victim recounted during an interview after the incident that while he was being sodomized, he fell face down, felt like he had no strength left and as if his body had left him thinking he was going to die. A major surgery was required to repair the wounds inflicted in this horrific sexual assault (Holley, 2017; Mills, 2018). The sexual assault of Black men dangerously points out cracks in the marble base of patriarchy that asserts men as penetrators in opposition to the penetrable, whether homosexuals, children, or adult women; intersectional theory does not take seriously such sexual violence by which Black males are targeted as subordinate males (Curry, 2017a).

Phallicism unravels perspectival apprehension for Black male embodiment that makes it liable to be subjected to coercion and control by through forms of state violence, such as mass-incarceration, police brutality, and other forms of anti-Black misandry within the larger ecology of White patriarchal hegemony. In a recent study conducted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2018), it was revealed that the statistics from civil society indicate that in 2015, more than 34% of unarmed civilians killed by police officers in the United States were Black and Black males were the larger proportion of this group. This study indicates that Black males are almost three times as likely, and Hispanic males are almost twice as likely, to be killed by police use of force as are White males. It made clear that these disparities are not to be conceived as anomalies, and neither should they be conceived as the product of different crime rates; they should be conceived as indicators of the disposability of Black male bodies within a social system that privileges the power of patriarchy. In this instance, Black males are stigmatized as violent brutes throughout multiple sectors of society. Among law enforcement, educational institutions, the at-large public, and even among many academics, Black men are theorized as terrors and popularly imagined to be pathological in nature (Curry, 2019). The most severe impacts of such negative social outcomes, propelled by the power of patriarchy, have been experienced by young Black males, who bear a disproportionately heavy burden at all stages of the criminal justice process. They are stopped and searched by police, arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated at levels far beyond their representation in the general population (American Sociological Association, 2007).

Due to the fact that patriarchal power is understood to be structurally permitted and interpersonally enforced, Black men are depicted and stereotyped as enacting patriarchy in any and all interpersonal relationships with women or other men. They are portrayed under intersectional theory as hegemonic and naturally inclined toward violence, especially sexual violence. As Curry (2017a) writes,

The intersectional responses to subordinate male target theory have continued to assert the superiority of their categorical structures of race, class, and gender as the basis of interpreting other models. In other words, intersectional approaches have continued to define other competing theories and evidence only within their rubrics of singularly disadvantaged and multiply disadvantaged group identities. So, while one may show that the categories necessary for intersectional calculi are inaccurate because Black maleness, for example, can also include histories of rape, sexual violence, and disproportionate death and incarceration, a heterosexual Black male is still defined as a single subordinate group within intersectionality because maleness is considered, analytically, to represent privilege. (p. 174)

Thus, within the framework of “The Theory of Phallicism,” Curry (2018) takes the rape and death of Black men and boys seriously and argues that all who care about their humanity should do so too. This theory exposes the rape of Black males as a genocidal tool that is deployed to ensure the annihilation or the ostracization of this group from society through death and dying. In this paradigm, the Black male can be seen as vulnerable to sexual violence, assault, and death just as any other member of subordinated groups within society.

Curry (2018) argues that phallicism, as a theory, suggests that the function of rape, and the simultaneity of the sexual threat used to legitimize the death of Black males and the erotics, the fascination which acts as depository of White sexual excess, operates beyond the lethality and genocidal logics Sidanius and Pratto utilize in describing the arbitrary-set discrimination. The rationale for this suggestion stems from the observation that since the rape of Black men serves no reproductive purpose and in fact undermines endogamy and the reproductive homogeneity of the dominant group men; whereas the rape of Black women has historically been utilized to create intermediary populations between the White dominant and Black subordinate populations, the rape of Black men serves no parallel function. It serves no reproductive function for the geometric rise of the “human property” of the dominant which corresponds to the rise of economic resources. It is simply a naked, brutal form of violence that is deployed as an expression of coerce, power, or coercion upon Black male bodies (Curry, 2018). Owing to the fact that intersectionality fails to account for such kinds of sexual and other forms of violent discrimination against Black males like rape, and death in the hands of agents of the state under patriarchal regimes, it is therefore not a useful theory to analyze their racial and sexual oppression, which then necessitates the propagation of a new theory—The theory of Phallicism. This theory provides a framework for conceptualizing Black male vulnerability, including the death of Black males and forms of sexual violence perpetrated against them in a world replete with anti-Black misandry.

Conclusion: See Me for Who I Am—Toward the Humanization of Black Males

. . . current [B]lack feminist analysis is often based on problems in interpersonal relationships, it, in many cases, is subjective.

Although intersectionality is a theory currently valorized within the academy, it is not without reproach. While intersectionality positions itself as a theoretical advance from Black feminism, its work continues in the tradition of Black feminism with the addition of a new name for conceptualizing the workings of identity (Nash, 2008). In its emphasis on Black women’s experiences of oppression, intersectional theory has obscured the question of whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiple marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity (Davis & Zarkov, 2017; Ken, 2008; McCall, 2005; Nash, 2008). According to Tomlinso (2019), “intersectional thinking emerged from the theorizing of women of color as a tool against structural subordination, an analytic to challenge structural inequality and call for institutional transformation” (p. 3). When intersectionality is positioned in this way, as a heuristic device or method of analysis that essentializes the experiences of women of color, it bellies its theoretical and applicative limitations—such as its inapplicability to account for the anti-Black misandric experiences of Black males.

Most of the theoretical assumptions of Black feminist theories deploying the framework of intersectionality to pathologize Black males are not grounded on facts or empirical data which shows how society continues to devalue, dispose, and destroy the lives of Black men and boys (Garneau, 2017; Hancock, 2016; Jibrin & Salem, 2015; Lutz, 2015). A specimen of such abstract characterizations of Black male-deviance can be found in some of the writings and publications of bell hooks concerning Black masculinity (or toxic Black masculinity). For instance, in We Real Cool, hooks (2004) writes thus:

Read any article or book on black masculinity and it will convey the message that black men are violent. The authors may or may not agree that black men are violent. The authors may or may not agree that black male violence is justified, or a response to being victimized by racism but they do agree that black men as a group are out of control, wild, uncivilized, natural-born predators. (p. 47)

Here, hooks (2004) is making some generalized and categorical claims about “published scholarship” (i.e., any article or book) that characterizes Black males as inherently violent but she failed to offer any textual citations to back this up. Yet, at the time she published We Real Cool, the works of researchers such as Staples (1982); Franklin (1988); Majors and Gordon (1994), that offered a different account of Black males as nonviolent but as socially progressive, were already published. It is quite telling that these kinds of scholarship that portray a positive image of Black masculinity were ignored in hook’s analysis. In fact, one of the primary objectives of hooks’ book, We Real Cool, is to demonize the Black male as a sexual predator or a rapist. ³

In her works, hooks (2004, 2015) seeks to describe the nature of the relationships of Black males with females as an avenue where they experience a disruption of the cool pose, and then they lash out by responding “with anger and sexual predation to maintain their dominator stance” and to demonstrate their sexist thinking (hooks, 2004, p. 57). She imagines the Black male as a beast that lashes out through the patriarchal impulse of manhood. As she proclaims, “as long as black males see no alternatives to patriarchal manhood they will nurture the beast within; they will be poised to strike. They will act on impulse, led by reactive rage” (hooks, 2004, p. 63).

This theoretical imagination of the Black male as primarily driven by rage and motivated by the need for violence is apparent in hooks’ opinions about the central park five case. In Killing Rage, hooks (2005) writes thus:

over and over in the past decade, activists have used Black rage as the largely unspoken justification for all kinds of despicable behavior [exhibited by Black men]—the outrageous lies of Al Sharpton during the Tawana Brawley caper, the gang rape by teenagers in the Central Park jogger case, the black boycott of Korean grocery, the reign of terror in Crown Heights. (p. 24)

She goes on to assert that “the black rage theory insults African-Americans because it allows any behavior by blacks to be excused—even celebrated—as a response to oppression” (hooks, 1995, p. 24). Thus, she believes that something is fundamentally flawed about the nature of Black males—whom she describes in We Real Cool, primarily as sexual predators and rapists.

It is quite telling that most of hook’s publications depicting Black males as exhibitors of toxic masculinity are bereft of any scholarly citation or empirical evidence. Sidanius et al. (2018) highlighted the lack of empirical evidence in the claims of intersectionality and Black feminist theory as one of its major weaknesses. They argue that while intersectionality theorists have qualitatively drawn attention to the fact that the racial and gender dimensions of oppression are both interactively implicated in the maintenance of group-based inequality, a fully satisfactory empirical analysis of the dynamics of racism and sexism has yet to be achieved. Yet, such imaginative demonization of Black males as sexual predators, rapists, or beasts are accorded privileges as “canonical” scholarship on Black males in the academia today because it fits properly into the social imagination that consider Black males as social deviants and sexual predators and extremely dangerous.

Under the guise of “creative writing” about Black males, pathological narratives are accepted as general theoretical truths, and standpoint epistemology becomes an acceptable lens of theorizing through privation of the female/Black female experience, often regarded as a special form of knowledge that cannot be questioned. However, Black males are not accorded the same facility to expound on their own experiences of oppression, both racial and sexual through such privation of knowledge. What the critical analysis attempted in this essay orient us toward is the fact that intersectionality and other Black feminist theories describes Black males as what they are not—the man-not. This is what makes it impossible for such theories to conceptualize the humanity of Black males. Since Black males are not subjects of—or in—theories emanating from their own experience, they are often conceptualized as the threat others fear them to be. This fear has been used to legitimize the thinking of Black males as degraded and deficient men who compensate for their lack of manhood through deviance and violence. But such caricaturized portrayals of Black males can only be contradicted by studying Black males for who they are and not what gender theory wants them to be.

I have argued in this essay that it is a mistake to advocate intersectionality as a framework for studying Black males given its defective fundamental assumptions about Black masculinity which makes it impossible to conceptualize the vulnerability of Black males. It is on this basis that I consider Táíwò’s interpretation of Curry’s The Man-Not as a deliberate misreading. One of Curry’s central critique of feminist theory and intersectionality which Táíwò (2018) seeks to defend is that it does not account for Black male vulnerability (including Black male sexual victimization and death). However, I think that Táíwò (2018) would have had a fruitful engagement with his attempted (but unsuccessful) defense if he had gone ahead to articulate how or the ways through which intersectionality, as he imagines it, can deal with this problem—the Black male problem. “A more correct analysis of Black manhood must focus on the vulnerability of the Black male, not the decontextualized assertion that his biological sex equals power, privilege, or a lust for domination” (Curry, 2017a, p. 131). This is what necessitates the formulation of a new theoretical lens—the theory of phallicism—to study the racial and sexual discrimination that Black males experience in this society. The theory of phallicism moves toward the humanization of Black males by rejecting the hegemonic categories through which they are described in theory. It exposes the subordinate status of Black males and insists that they are humans; they are not brutes, super-human, super-masculine, macho men as caricaturized in Black feminist theory and intersectional theory. This is why it will be a grave mistake to subsume the dilemmas of Black manhood under intersectionality as Táíwò (2018) suggested, ignoring the prejudiced “gendered” politics and mythos that prevents it from accounting for the sexual victimization and death of Black males.