Black Men from behind the Veil

Black Men from Behind the Veil bears witness to anti-Black male violence and does so from the perspective of Black male scholars who disclose their fears and what it means to suffer as Black men, courageously marking the deep material, institutional, and epistemic structures that amplify that fear and suffering.

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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Speaking Behind and To the Veil

George Yancy

1. Incarcerating Blackness: My Nephew, His Letter from an Arizona Prison, Our Reflections

William David Hart

2. Philosophy as Excited Delirium and the Credibility Deficit of the Black Male

Clevis Headley

3. Emmett Till’s Body

A. Todd Franklin

4. The War on Blackness: Black Men and the State of the Union

Arnold L. Farr

5. Blues Sons and Sorrow’s Kitchen

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

6. Disaggregating Death: George Floyd and the Significance of Black Male Mortality in Police Encounters

Tommy J. Curry

7. Theory, Epistemic Failure, and the Problem of (Hue)Man Suffering

Timothy J. Golden

8. What’s Happening Brother?

Josiah Ulysses Young III

9. To be Over-Determined from Without: Negotiating White Supremacy from Corporeal Blackness

Linden F. Lewis

10. Navigating the Aguala: Blackness, Shamans and Drag Queens

Sterlin Mosley

11. Power, Divorce, and Trauma: Law and Loss

Floyd W. Hayes III

12. Black Subversive Memory and a Black Progressive Leadership as Resources for Black Male Engagement in Prolonged Resistance Against White Power Structures

Joseph Smith

13. Alternative Hip Hop Masculinity: On Hip Hop Hypermasculinity, Heteronormativity & Radical Humanism

Reiland Rabaka

14. How Black Lives Matter and Why Revolutionary Philosophy is Relevant:

Philosophical Considerations on Ideological and Political Economic Contradictions

John H. McClendon III

15. The Spectacle Lynching and Modern-Day Crucifixion of George Floyd

When the World is a Witness to Murder

Aaron X. Smith

16. Blood on the Check

Semassa Boko

About the Contributors