by eric d. graham
While debating issues about abortion, arguing about the relevance of the #MeToo Movement and fighting over terms like Toxic Masculinity, we continue to WITNESS the murder of innocent Black men by the hands of the government, police officers, white vigilantes, and white supremacist, which sometimes comes in the form of character assassination-by the way of images of blackface wore by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in an old yearbook, the pushing of 1994 Crime Bill by Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, the banning of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan from Facebook along with the recent sealed FBI audio tapes alleging Martin Luther King Jr. had affairs with 40 women, while watching a friend rape another... .
All of these incidents and ideas of discussion, create an atmosphere, where murder can be justified-regardless if the person is innocent.
Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, Tommy J. Curry, in his book entitled The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and The Dilemmas of Black Man address these conflicting issues and their relationship to Black Male Masculinity in America.
"What does it MEAN to think of the Black Male-to pull the meaning of his existence away from his body to be used by thought? How possible is it for him to be thought of, studied, or engaged beyond the historical caricaturization(s) that relegate him to the Macho, the criminal, the liar, the rapist, the murderer, the thug, the deadbeat father, the abuser, the misogynnist, the beast, the beast cub, the super-predator, or the devil? Is he nothing more than an unactualized (hu)man, a fatally flawed thing, struggling not against the murderous logics that rationalize his death but against the savageness assigned to him that continues to justify treating him as a nonhuman entity?
The Black male is unthought. He is an intuitive problem, an analytic falling designated by the negative ascription of Blackness and maleness. He is being who is described and defined by his menace, with little need to be understood as a living and complex human being subject to external and environmental forces and vulnerable to the mental anguish or depression of his death, imprisonment, and abuse within the present order of American society."-
With that said, this criminalization and constant murder, or justified homicide of the Black male body is an every present narrative, on the nightly news, the daily papers, Hollywood movies, and historical myths, which appear and reappear in the sub-conscious mind, and psyche of individuals, who, sometimes, tragically, live out- these dramatize stories into the real world, making them a bloody
We see evidence of these stories in the Bible, in the story of Joseph "The Prince of Egypt, where in Exodus 1;15-16, it is stated that:... the king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth, look at the child when you deliver it. If it’s a boy, kill it, but if it’s a girl, let it live.”
This story, of course, reappears in the so-called new Testament as well, in Matthew 2:16, which states: "Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under...
Therefore, be mindful and conscious of your daily surroundings, preparing and protecting your children with wisdom and understanding during these troubling times, as the world debates abortion, the school to prison pipeline, guns in school, and even reparation.(bobbeethehater.blogspot.com)
