THE MAN-NOT - TOMMY J. CURRY

A dense read to work through while feeding my baby. I can’t really read a physical book when the baby is sleeping on me, and it seems bad for my brain to just look at my phone so I try to read off my Kindle. I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, it has a fearsome reputation, so I decided to give it a go. Because of how I read it, it took a while to get through, despite not being too long, but it did deliver the deep thoughts I was looking for. Curry gets treated like he’s some insane hotep, some non-serious grifter and buffoon like Dr. Umar (who is funny and mostly harmless, his YT equivalents get very little of the pushback he gets but still, he is not a deep thinker with serious stuff to stay), some misogynist hiding behind pan-Africanism. Not so. Curry is a very serious scholar and writer who is making a really nuanced and precise point of critique against the prevailing intersectional reading of Black men. Namely, that since they occupy a position as “men” in the gender category, this privileges them in some ways and it means they seek to obtain more power through patriarchy, as a sort of junior partner to YT men. The problem is that statistics about life-outcomes don’t really support this. More Black women are college-educated than Black men, they live longer, they are not incarcerated at the same rates nor face the same mortality from the police and crime generally, by numerous socio-economic factors, they are doing worse, and culturally, they seem less considered and thought about than practically any (non-NDN) group. Curry seeks to show how Black men aren’t just discriminated against because they are Black, but they face particular gendered discrimination by being male. The sections about sexual violence against Black men was prehaps the most provactive part. Curry traces the rapes Black men endured by both men and women during slavery to the sexually focused violence that they endure at the hands of police and prisions guards today. You can read tons of accounts, from the Attica riots to the rape of Abner Louima to see the particular focus the police give Black men’s gentiles when assaulting them, this isn’t a one-off thing. Now, while I think that this is true, though there is no way it is anywhere close the the amount of rape that Black women have endured, he is right that because Black men are seen as sexual aggressors and horny manics, this dynamic is swept under the rug. He does a close reading of some of Eldgridge Cleaver's work, which was interesting since Cleaver writes some of the most provocative stuff available from the Black Power movement and it’s nice to see someone taking it seriously. The idea that hit me hardest in this book, besides the much-needed rebuke to simple intersectionality, has to do with the ways we assume that Masculinity is synonymous with patriarchy. I’d like to see some writing that pushes this idea further.