Black Men from behind the Veil

Ontological Interrogations

George Yancy

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666906486
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Speaking Behind and To the Veil
• 1 Incarcerating Blackness: My Nephew, His Letter from an Arizona Prison, Our Reflections
• 2 Philosophy as Excited Delirium and the Credibility Deficit of the Black Male
• 3 Emmett Till’s Body
• 4 The War on Blackness: Black Men and the State of the Union
• 5 Blues Sons and Sorrow’s Kitchen
• 6 Disaggregating Death: George Floyd and the Significance of Black Male Mortality in Police Encounters
• 7 Theory, Epistemic Failure, and the Problem of (Hue)Man Suffering: A Phenomenology of Breathlessness
• 8 What’s Happening Brother?
• 9 To be Overdetermined from Without: Negotiating White Supremacy from Corporeal Blackness
• 10 Navigating the Aguala: Blackness, Shamans, and Drag Queens
• 11 Power, Divorce, and Trauma: Law and Loss
• 12 Black Subversive Memory and a Black Progressive Leadership as Resources for Black Male Engagement in Prolonged Resistance against White Power Structures
• 13 Alternative Hip Hop Masculinity: On Hip Hop Hypermasculinity, Heteronormativity, and Radical Humanism
• 14 How Black Lives Matter and Why Revolutionary Philosophy Is Relevant: Philosophical Considerations on Ideological and Political Economic Contradictions
• 15 The Spectacle Lynching and Modern-Day Crucifixion of George Floyd: When the World Is a Witness to Murder
• 16 Blood on the Check
• Index
• About the Contributors