The Black male scholars within this important book are painfully aware that the brutal murder of George Floyd was not due to a few "bad apples." They understand that they are perceived as "threats" and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary that is embedded with processes of mythopoetic construction, racial capitalism, and a deep anti-Black male social ontology. Edited by prominent philosopher George Yancy, Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations emphasizes the importance of Black male epistemic agency and the courage to speak the truth regarding an America that values Black male life on the cheap and that attempts to control the movement of Black men, their capacity to breathe, and their being through anti-Black technologies of surveillance, confinement, policing, and white nation-building. There is no single monolithic Black male voice that dominates this crucial and necessary text. Each voice speaks of pain behind the Veil, revealing narrative specificity and an important recursive truth: Black men, within the white American psyche, are both necessary and yet disposable. The existential and sociohistorical weight of this truth is made painfully clear through the voices of these Black men.
George Yancy is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Speaking Behind and To the Veil George Yancy Incarcerating Blackness: My Nephew, His Letter from an Arizona Prison, Our Reflections William David Hart Philosophy as Excited Delirium and the Credibility Deficit of the Black Male Clevis Headley Emmett Till's Body A. Todd Franklin The War on Blackness: Black Men and the State of the Union Arnold L. Farr Blues Sons and Sorrow's Kitchen Houston A. Baker, Jr. Disaggregating Death: George Floyd and the Significance of Black Male Mortality in Police Encounters Tommy J. Curry Theory, Epistemic Failure, and the Problem of (Hue)Man Suffering Timothy J. Golden What's Happening Brother? Josiah Ulysses Young III To be Over-Determined from Without: Negotiating White Supremacy from Corporeal Blackness Linden F. Lewis Navigating the Aguala: Blackness, Shamans and Drag Queens Sterlin Mosley Power, Divorce, and Trauma: Law and Loss Floyd W. Hayes III Black Subversive Memory and a Black Progressive Leadership as Resources for Black Male Engagement in Prolonged Resistance Against White Power Structures Joseph Smith Alternative Hip Hop Masculinity: On Hip Hop Hypermasculinity, Heteronormativity & Radical Humanism Reiland Rabaka How Black Lives Matter and Why Revolutionary Philosophy is Relevant: Philosophical Considerations on Ideological and Political Economic Contradictions John H. McClendon III The Spectacle Lynching and Modern-Day Crucifixion of George Floyd When the World is a Witness to Murder Aaron X. Smith Blood on the Check Semassa Boko About the Contributors
Yancy offers another outstanding collection of essays. Black Men behind the Veil provides a rich understanding of what being a Black man in an anti-Black society is like.... Yancy's editorial fecundity and the contributors' acumen vis-a-vis the history of philosophy and their ability to diagnose the present moment will be much appreciated by readers with interests in philosophy, race, Blackness, contemporary US culture, and criminal justice. Though targeted at those working in philosophy of race and sociology, the book will most certainly appeal to a general audience concerned with matters of race and justice. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice Reviews * A masterful anthology that reveals the absolute evil of racial misandry. Voices that live the experience of anti-Black misandry that scream the utter sadness expressed by W.E.B. DuBois at the death of his son in 'Of the Passing of the First-Born.' By death, his son escaped the terror of life as a Black man. A life that would be constantly on a tightrope, trapped in a fixed identity of demeaning stereotypes that would portray him as the embodiment of laziness, hyper-masculinity, and hyper-patriarchy: a predator, failed parent, and useless husband. Black Men from Behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations gives us new theories, tools, concepts, and terms that are not trapped in a world that treats the ontological being-the collective population of Black men-as an undifferentiated debased essence. Black men tell their story. -- Leonard Harris, Purdue University In a characterstically brilliant, relevant, and prophetic series of books edited by George Yancy, we are treated to a series of well-crafted essays that carefully examine the interiors of human pain embedded in blackness. This book should be mandatory reading in schools and universities where critical race theory is being fought against. Here is a book that could respond to that resistance with scholarly rigor and high intelligence by leading scholars at the top of their fields. I am much impressed by this long-awaited book. -- Teodros Kiros, Berklee College of Music Black Men from behind the Veil collects essays from a diverse and vibrant cross-section of contemporary philosophers of race and black male studies. This text stands out as both an elegy for those who still can't breathe and a future of that philosophical logos that starts, with a gasp, in the grasping of that which is disclosed and concealed in those black bodies behind the veil, and the continuance of the violence that enshrouds them/us. The authors in this collection focus our attention on anti-black violence and its traditions and stands out as a challenge for its readers to take up this thinking, this situation, this relation to being, and think them anew without apologetics and excuses. -- Alfred Frankowski, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
