“The academic theorist fears the Black males represented in our present day, so it is easy to rationalize these phobias, which interpret Black men as patriarchal, violent, and indifferent to the suffering of others, as method.”

“Making one’s phobias a historically salient feature of the world lends objectivity to the subjective, so establishing these stereotypes as antecedents legitimizes Black masculinity as theory rather than as theorists’ pathology.”

“Why do our imaginings of BM from slavery to the present day begin with these associations? Despite their origins in America beginning alongside the Black female slave, BM are thought to reproduce and desire rather than resist & disown the (white) patriarchy of American empire.”

“But what account or reading of history justifies this perspective? What motivates the scholar to interpret all political activity by Black men as their attempts to mimic the white male patriarch, instead of their efforts to redefine, re-create, and reconfigure Black manhood?”

“The demand to recognize race and gender as central to Black women’s historical struggles was accompanied by the power not only to define the Black female subject but also to insist on her motivations and her aims. The Black male subject, however, has no such power.”

“Scholars investigating Black manhood are not only denied the ability to assert that Black males do not, in fact, conform to white masculinity but also condemned for suggesting that Black men do not, in fact, aim for this semblance, given their distance from gender/MAN/human.”

“Under the current paradigm, Black males are theorized as only mimetic entities, incapable of reflectively challenging white patriarchal social roles.”

- The Man-Not, Tommy J Curry

“Contrary to the dogmas of Black masculinity, Black manhood was a dynamic historical character that not only recognized the importance of Black women to the racial project, an idea that simply was not controversial under nineteenth-century ethnology, but also challenged 1/2

white patriarchy’s various manifestations as systems of economic oppression, programs of colonial imperialism, and doctrines of racial evolution.” 2/2

“Our current studies of Black men primarily focus on politics, meaning that Black men are judged by the extent to which they included Black women in organizations or leadership positions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

“Rooted in the identitarian logics of our present day, which concede knowledge about gender to the perspectives voiced by the bodies marked by gender, Black men who lived centuries ago are held to post-integrationist standards of intersectional theories developed in the 1980s.”

“Under this paradigm, BM are deemed sexist or non-sexist, patriarchal or progressive, by the extent to which they mirror the attitudes of Black women of their own time, not by their actual thoughts about white patriarchy and its systemic reverberations throughout the centuries.”

“Whereas the purity and virtue of the nineteenth-century Victorian white woman was dislodged by historicizing her position and participation within a racialized and capitalist American empire, today the myth of moral infallibility has been reestablished by” 1/2

“our twenty-first-century practice of combining race and gender categories such that the Black woman has now replaced her nineteenth-century predecessor as the transcendent feminine idol unaffected by her historical epoch.”

- The Man Not, Tommy J. Curry