Michael Brown and the Need for a Genre Study of Black Male Death and Dying

Tommy J. Curry
But say to a people: The one virtue is to be white, and the people rush to the inevitable conclusion, Kill
the nigger! (W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater, 1920).

Introduction
Michael Brown is dead. His life was taken, August 9, 2014 by a police officer named Darren Wilson for jaywalking.
He was executed in broad daylight with his hands up; his final moments being described by his friend Dorian
Johnson as frightening, terror-filled, and violent. 1 Like the deaths of many Black men before him, Michael Brown
was executed by a police officer and then blamed for his own death. 2 Justifications for the murder of Michael Brown
ranged from him attacking the officer which resulted in the broken eye-socket of Darren Wilson to police
propaganda directed at painting Mr. Brown as a robbery suspect posthumously.3 This is not the first time nor will it
be the last that Black men will be thought to deserve death for the danger they pose to society and the fear they
inspire in the white imagination.
The unabated murder of Black males in America has a long history; a history whose study is now taken to be
decadent and exclusionary. Despite Black males occupying the bottom of every measure of a populations health and
prosperity, this reality is largely displaced by calls like that of Paul Butler urging us to deemphasize the actual
depravations of Black males because attention to their specific ills risks perpetuating patriarchy. Black men are still
men, says Butler, They dont have access to all the benefits of the patriarchy, but they have some of them. To the
extent that Black male exceptionalism allocates gender-based benefits, there is the danger that it reinforces genderbased hierarchy. In a patriarchal system, empowering men poses potential dangers. 4 But such a perspective does
little to arrest the actual deaths of Black males in America or advance our understandings of the causes underlying
their murder at the hands of an increasingly militarized police state. The disciplinary division asserted between
Black men and boys and every other raced, gendered, and classed subject, which is presumed to be more
oppressed purely from an arithmetic conducted upon race, class, and gender categories a priori, prevents a serious
study of the relationship between the historical and political causes of the seemingly endless violence against Black
males. Our intersectional conceptualizations of gender progressivism are blind to the sexualized and specific
dimensions of Black male death.5 In failing to address the deeper causes responsible for the death of so many Black
men, often at the hands of those seemingly charged with their protection, we fail to address Americas long-standing
predilection towards killing Black males that is not easily reduced to the fact of racism. 6
While Black men and boys continue to die at the hands of the state and white vigilantes, disciplinary morality asserts
that scholars should resist the urge to theoretically account for these deaths through any serious philosophical or
conceptual study. Black male scholars throughout the university have noted the resistance of journals and various
disciplines to seriously consider Black male vulnerability beyond Black feminism or other paradigms which assume
Black males to be culturally maladjusted and pathologically violent. 7 Any study of Black male vulnerability is taken
to be odds with and thereby erasing Black female suffering. Conferences are reluctant to accept papers, editors
discourage submitting such work for review, and there is a permissible vitriol towards the authors of such work
allowing booing, ridicule, and intimidation throughout the academy. This makes for an implicit, but permissible,
censorship within the academy of discussions about Black male vulnerability, be it political, sexual, or economic, as
well as a denial of the need for new theories beyond the generic language of intersectionality to speak to the death
that disproportionately affects Black males. Black men are disproportionately affected by violence, incarceration,
poverty, unemployment, and suicide in this country, yet there is an insistence that the deaths of Black men need not
be accounted for beyond racism in our current political milieu. 8 This moratorium discourages research into
dilemmas peculiar to Black males, ultimately coercing Black men into accepting their erasure as a matter of
disciplinarity. This silence takes advantage of the deaths which make Black men underrepresented throughout
society, and the racism making it unlikely that they will matriculate from high school, college, and ultimately be
present and considered in the academy.9
Michael Browns death, like that of Vonderitt Myers, Oscar Grant, John Crawford, Jordan Davis, and Stephen Watts,
represents the accumulation of an intellectual failure to grasp the complexities and the motivations implicated within
the genocidal logics of American racism. The negrophobia that drove white America to endorse lynching as a
technology of murder is the same anxiety and fear that now allows the white public to endorse the murder of Black

men and boys as justifiable homicides. Black males are often killed by police officers because the officer claims
they fear for their lives. This phobia is a normalized and institutional program used to justify police violence,
ostracism, and incarcerationit is a fear that is given so much weight in individual cases precisely because it is a
fear that both white America and many racial and ethnic groups in America share as well. The vulnerability of Black
men and boys lie in this consensus. The agreement that Black males can be killed and that the individuals
responsible for these murders will be ideologically supported in their rationalizations and financially rewarded for
their actions.10 I am particularly concerned by the myth of the super-predator, and the disciplinary proliferation of
similar pathological concepts about Black masculinity used to justify the murder of Black males in society and
obscure the full viewing of Black male oppression in America.
Lil Niggers: Black Masculinity and Negrophobia
The death of Michael Brown was not an aberration to American democracy, but the fulfillment of its promises of
order and stability for the (white) majority. As historian A.J. William-Myers notes in Destructive Impulses: An
Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence, white violencewas part and parcel of the
socioeconomic and political structure of the American democratic process. 11 Pointing to the enormous capacity of
American democracy to absorb unprecedented level of violence and not be structurally damaged by it, WilliamsMyers concludes that anti-Black violence and the societal legitimation of the white agents responsible for the death
of Black people serve to maintain societal order, and bolster the implicit ideological power of white supremacy in
America. Stated differently, contrary to the democratic calls for justice currently insisted upon by activists and
scholars alike, the deaths of Black men and boys in America serve to indicate the health of American democracy not
its malaise.
For young Black boys, maleness in a white supremacist society is fraught with difficulty and the all too likely
outcome of death. Even as men, this racialized masculinity is not thought to result in a recognizable intellectual
maturity, and social standing of a citizen; rather the masculinity impressed upon these Black-male-bodies is known
only through its uncontrollable excess, its lack of maturation, where any and all transgressions (no matter how small
or idiosyncratic) are understood to be demonstrations of the more primitive and uncivilized aspects of a not yet
evolved savagery. As Geoffrey Canada, President of the Harlem Children Zone, remarks, The image of the male as
strong is mixed with the image of male as violent. Male is virile get confused with male as promiscuous. Male as
adventurous equals male as reckless. Male as intelligent often gets mixed with male as arrogant, racist, and sexist
Boys find themselves pulled and tugged by forces beyond their control as they make the confusing and sometimes
perilous trip to manhood.12 The milieu from which Black manhood springs is saturated with racist caricatures that
all seem to legitimate the fear Americans have of Black men. The images and perceptions of Black men as
dangerous to society, women, and themselves ultimately create a pattern of thinking that works to justify their
seemingly inevitable deaths. The relationship between anti-Black racism (the hate of Blacks) and anti-Black
chauvinism (the hate of Black males as the barbarous sex) is not adequately captured by a focus on the manhood
denied to Black men and boys. Such positions erroneously depict Black men as purely mimetic creatures incapable
of generating identities outside of the decadent tropes offered by white patriarchy. A more correct analysis of racism
and chauvinism would understand that Black male oppression and death is rooted in an imposition of a deadly
masculine caricaturea barbarism justifying multiple genocidal logics and encouraging a racist misandry
throughout this society and the disciplines birthed from it. Ultimately, Black male suffering is made generic,
thought to only be the function of racism, so in an era pushing intellectuals and policy-makers alike to be antiessentialist (problematizing racial explanations of inequality), Black men are deemed unfit for study.
The Black male is not born a patriarchal male. He is raced and sexed peculiarly, configured as barbaric and savage,
imagined to be a violent animal, not a human being. His mere existence ignites the negrophobia taken to be the
agreed upon justification for his death. Black male death lessens their economic competition with, as well as their
political radicality against, white society. It is this fear of Black males that allows society to support the imposition
of death on these bodies, and consent to the rationalizations the police state offer as their justifications for killing the
Black-male beast (the rapist, the criminal, and the deviant-thug). The young Black males death, the death of Black
boys, is merely an extension of this logicthe need to destroy the Black beast cub before it matures into full
pathology. The Black boy, that child, is seen as the potential Nigger-beast. This anti-Black dynamic which
specifically affects the Black boy has been referred to by Elaine Brown as a new kind of racism, a racism built upon
the anti-Black mythology of Americas Black males as the super-predator. This super-predator mythology not only
acts to legitimize the violence responsible for the deaths of Black males, but inculcates the rationalization that given

what Black males actually are, Black male death is necessary and an indispensable strategy for the safety and
security of American society.13 Overlooking the genocidal disposition of America towards Black males presents an
incomplete diagnosis of the impetus behind the levels of violence and sanctions imposed upon Black communities
(Black women, Black families) in an effort to control the lives of young Black males.14
Even childhood cannot protect young Black boys from the genocidal logics of American society. Black boys are
seen as more culpable for their actions (i.e., less innocent) within a criminal justice context than are their peers of
other races. 15 Because Black boys are actually perceived as older as and hence more culpable for their behavior,
there is an implicit dehumanization that not only predicts racially disparate perceptions of Black boys but also
predicts racially disparate police violence toward Black children in real-world settings. 16 Police often imagine the
Black boya childto be physically threatening; the manifestation of the savagery thought to be inherent to his
Black maleness; a violent beast and predator. The association of Black males with animals, specifically apes and
monkeys, diminishes our sympathies for their humanity; caricatures found to not only increase the propensity for,
but also the acceptance of greater levels of violence directed towards them. Phillip A. Goffs implicit bias research
has explained that the association between the Negro and ape is not simply an abstract and detached stereotype, but
rather a historical trope used to justify the dehumanization of Black people which is a method by which individuals
and social groups are targeted for cruelty, social degradation, and state-sanctioned violence. 17 Black male death and
dying is the result of this engineered societal program, and the machinations of this apparatus obscures and in many
cases denies our ability to see the lives of Black men and boys as worthwhile.
A Conclusion Gesturing Towards a Genre Study of Black Male Death and Dying
In No Humans Involved, Sylvia Wynter urges the reader to consider the relationship between the paradigms of
dehumanization that resulted in the genocide of Armenians by Turkish pan-nationalists, the holocaust inflicted upon
Jews by the Germans, and the language used to describe Black men as a species deserving death. Because Black
men are thought to be not human, there is a tendency to embrace their sociological condition as their essential
characteristics. Black males are thought to be the origins of their conditions rather than their conditions being the
origin of their problems. The designation of Black males as problems in society, simultaneously enforced by our
academic theories demanding the de-emphasis of their plight allows such ideologies to operate without challenge.
Such conceptualizations, contends Wynter, while not overtly genocidal, are clearly serving to achieve parallel
results: the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal and everyday means. 18
Similarly, Huey P. Newton has argued in Fear and Doubt that society responds to [the lower socioeconomic
Black man] as a thing, a beast, a nonentity, something to be ignored or stepped on. He is asked to respect laws that
do not respect him.19 Ultimately, it is the Black men and boys who remain isolated, condemned, and ignored by
theory that have been made to pay the sacrificial costs for the relatively improved conditions since the 1960s that
have impelled many black Americans out of the ghettos and into the suburbs. 20 Black males are the depositories of
the negativity traditional associated with Blackness that makes transcendence, socially, politically and conceptually,
possible for other Black bodies.
There is an eerie connection between the deaths of Black males in society and the erasure of Black men from the
realm of theory. In reality, Black males are genre-ed as non-human and animalistic in the minds of whites, 21 but our
theories relish assigning the death of Black males to the generic description of racism, a notion not thoroughly
analyzed in identity scholarship and unable to inadequately capture the specific kind of oppression and violence that
defines Black male existence. Michael Brown was a victim; a display of the power white life has over this kind of
Black existencea demonstration of the seemingly endless limit of white individuals power to enforce the antiBlack consensus of society towards these specific Black-male kinds. His deathBlack Male Deathshows that
racism is not simply racial antipathy, but the power whites assert over the world, thereby making Black life
inconsequential in its rush to acquire ownership over reality; a dynamic creating the orders of knowledge as an
extension of the order of society necessary to maintain anti-Blackness and preserve white supremacy. Because this
racist societal architecture is de-emphasized, academic discourse(s) of race-class-genderpresupposing the infinite
power of all male bodiesprefigures a conceptual calculus dedicated to eradicating the vulnerability of Black men
because they are men. Black men are thought to be mimetic (white) patriarchs; an untenable theoretical position
given the empirical evidence of Black male disadvantage, but one that serves to affirm societys assuredness in
holding that his death is the only way to remedy the dangers he poses to society. We can see the corpse of Michael
Brown, but do we really understand the vulnerability of Black boys enough to theorize his life?

Notes

1 Trymaine Lee, Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friends death, MSNBC.com, August 12, 2014,
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eyewitness-michael-brown-fatal-shooting-missouri

2 Frances Roble & Julie Bosman, Autopsy Shows Michael Brown Was Struck at Least 6 Times, New York Times.com,
August
17th,
2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/michael-brown-autopsy-shows-he-was-shot-at-least-6times.html?_r=0

3 German Lopez, Did Darren Wilson have a broken eye socket after his encounter with Michael Brown?, Slate.com,
August 21st, 2014, http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/21/6054237/source-to-cnn-darren-wilson-didnt-have-a-fractured-eyesocket. For a discussion of the robbery accusation, see Mark Peters and Ben Kensling, Police: Officer Wasn't Aware
Michael Brown Was Suspect in Alleged Robbery, Wall Street Journal.com, August 15, 2014,
http://online.wsj.com/articles/police-name-darren-wilson-as-officer-in-ferguson-missouri-michael-brown-shooting1408108371, and Trymaine Lee and Michele Richinick, Police: Michael Brown Stopped because He Blocked Traffic,
MSNBC.com, August 15, 2014, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ferguson-police-name-michael-brown

4 Paul Butler, Black Male Exceptionalism: The Problems and Potential of Black Male Focused Interventions, DuBois
Review 12.2 (2013): 485-511, 503. Ironically, only Black men seem to be subject to this kind of analysis. We do not hear
race-crits objecting to programs for white women on the basis of perpetuating white supremacy, nor do we hear objections
to equal pay initiatives for women despite Black men holding less wealth and income than white women, and less
education, social mobility, and income once we factor in zero employment and incarceration when compared to Black
women (see Becky Pettits Invisible Men).

5 Intersectionality has long been criticized for an unprovable thesis concerning Black male privilege and the lack of
applicability to the deaths and police violence Black men experience, see Darren Hutchinson, Identity Crisis:
Intersectionality, Multidimensionality, and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination. Michigan Journal of
Race and Law 6.2 (2010):285-318 where he argues that intersectionality does not pay attention to the role that Black
heterosexual male stereotypes have historically be linked to violence, he says: Lynching, for example, was frequently
justified through a racist, sexualized rhetoric that constructed black males as heterosexual threats to white women. Thus,
heterosexual status, typically a privileged category, has served as a source of racial subjugation (312). The most recent
articulation of his position surprisingly comes from Althena Mutuas Multidimensionality is to Masculinities what
Intersectionality is to Feminism. Nevada Law Review 13, (2013): 341-367 which argues that:
When intersectionality was applied to black men, it was initially interpreted to suggest that black men were
privileged by gender and subordinated by race; that is, black men sat at the intersection of the subordinating and
oppressive system of race (black) and the privileged system of gender (men). Intuitively this notion seemed correct. It
also seemed to support the dominant social and academic practice of examining the oppressive conditions that black
men faced from a racial perspective. Yet, the interpretation of black men as privileged by gender and oppressed by
race appeared incorrect in our observations of racial profiling...while this interpretation of intersectionality seemed to
capture some of the differentials between women and men in the black community, as in wage differentials for
example, it did not capture the harsher treatment black men seemed to face, not only in the context of anonymous
public space that often characterized racial profiling, but also in terms of higher rates of hyper incarceration, death by
homicide and certain diseases, suicide rates, and high unemployment as compared to black women (344-345).

6 Our current configurations of race, class, and gender blind us to the historic victimization of Black males by making
certain types of oppression categorically attached to female body. Black men were raped by white men and women, see
Thomas Foster, The Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery, Journal of the History of Sexuality 20.3
(2011):445-464, and eaten by whites in rituals of cannibalisma ritual specific to the kind of raced thing the Black male
was, see Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homo-Eroticism within Slave Culture, eds.
Justin A. Joyce & Dwight McBride (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

7 See T. Hasan Johnson, From Amadou Diallo to Mike Brown: Challenging the Institutionalized Profitization of Black
Male Hatred in Law Enforcement, Media, and Extremist Black Feminism, Black Masculinism and NewBlack
Masculinities, last modified August 16th, 2014,
http://newblackmasculinities.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/hatred_of_black_men/

8 Black men and boys are at the bottom of every demographic of study. See James B. Stewart and Joseph W. Scott, The
Institutional Decimation of Black American Males, Western Journal of Black Studies (1978):82-92 for the relationship
between Black male incarceration and societal viability. For a discussion of how stereotypes about Black males being
criminals and dishonest effect employment, see Ronald B. Mincy, eds., Black Males Left Behind (Washington D.C.: The
Urban Institute Press, 2006). For a discussion of how Black male incarceration and unemployment not only show that Black
males have lower income than their female and racial counterparts, but also how incarceration creates sample bias across all
datasets used to understand Black men and boys, see Becky Pettit, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black
Progress (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). For Black male vulnerability to domestic abuse, see Carolyn M.
West, Partner Abuse in Ethnic Minority and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations, Partner Abuse 3.3
(2012): 336-357.

9 Historically, Black men have been the most disadvantaged in education, see Anne McDaniel et al., The Black Gender
Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons, Demography 48 (2011): 889914.

10 See Becky Bratu, After Zimmerman's Website Raises More than $200,000, Prosecution Asks Judge to Raise Bond,
MSNBC.com, April 27, 2012, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/27/11427416-after-zimmermans-website-raisesmore-than-200000-prosecution-asks-judge-to-raise-bond
Also see Natalie DiBlasio, Cash raised for Mo. Cop Surpasses Brown Donations,USAToday.com, August 24, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/23/support-darren-wilson-rally/14495459/

11 A.J. William-Myers, Destructive Impulses: An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1995, 10.

12 Geoffrey Canada, Reaching up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998,
xiii).

13 Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Lil B: New Age Racism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

14 Our present configurations of race, class, and gender exclude material accounts of the role that criminogenic accounts
have on the lives of Black people generally and how this affects Black women specifically. The death of Rekia Boyd for
instance was the consequence of an off-duty cop (Dante Servin) shooting at Antonio Cross, see Erin Meyer, Rekia Boyd's
Friend Sues Chicago Cop Who Killed Unarmed Woman, DNAinfoChicago.com, March 21, 2013,
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130321/chicago/rekia-boyds-friend-sues-chicago-cop-who-killed-unarmed-woman. The
force used to apprehend Chauncey Owens similarly caused the death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, see Diane Bukowski,
Owens Never Said Aiyana Jones Dad Gave Him the Gun Used in Teens Killing, VoiceofDetroit.net, May 23, 2011,

http://voiceofdetroit.net/2011/05/23/owens-never-said-aiyana-jones%E2%80%99-dad-gave-him-gun-used-in-teen
%E2%80%99s-killing/

15 Phillip Attiba Goff et al., The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children, Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 106.4 (2014): 526-545, 540.

16 Ibid.

17 Phillip Attiba Goff et. al, Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary
Consequences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94.2 (2008):292-306.

18 Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Conception, Voices of the African Diaspora: The CAAS
Research Review 8.2 (1992): 13-16, 14.

19 Huey P. Newton, Fear and Doubt, in Essays from the Minister of Defense (USA: Black Panther Party), 15-18, 17.

20 Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved, 14.

21 In an Interview in Proudflesh, Proudflesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 4 (2006): 1-36,
Sylvia Wynter says, I coined the word genre, or I adapted it, because genre and gender come from the same root.
They mean kind, one of the meanings is kind. Now what I am suggesting is that gender has always been a function of
the instituting of kind. For example, in our order, which is a bourgeois order of kind, a bourgeois order of the human, the
woman was supposed to be the housewife and the man was supposed to be the breadwinner. Each was as locked into their
roles. By making the feminist movement into a bourgeois movement, what theyve done is to fight to be equal
breadwinners. This means that the breadwinning man and the breadwinningwoman become a new class, so that the woman
who remains in her role becomes a part of a subordinated class (24).