CEPPA Talks 2019 20 – Abstracts

Tommy Curry (Edinburgh)

“Ad Limen Homini: Caricatures of Man within the Schema of Racial Disposability ”

Since the 19thcentury, racialized males have been thought to pose a threat to Western civilization. The fear white societies have of Black males has been well documented throughout history in ethnological and social sciences, psychology, and philosophy. Despite the repetitive caricatures of racialized males as savage beasts who threaten to devolve western civilization towards primitivity and pestilence, there has been no philosophical inquiry into the presence of this racialized entity within Western patriarchal societies. This paper will be the first to articulate a schema of racism as a misandric aggression where the disposability of Black (male) bodies is explained through racial endogamy rather than white ignorance of racism or white aversions to otherness. This paper maintains that the racial phobics associated with outgroup men ground the America’s civil society.