The Enemy Within the white Mind: Analyzing the Role of Misandric Caricatures in Psychological Assessments of Black Males.

Tommy Curry with Charles Brown (respondent)

This is the latest in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Psycho-Philosophical Dialogues between academic philosophers and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to their academic decolonial work.

Members of the Guild are invited to use the promotional code MEMBER for a 25% discount. Students are invited to use the promotional code STUDENT for a 50% discount.

Abstract - Prof. Tommy Curry

Efforts to decolonize various disciplines and institutions have led to an interrogation of white clinical and institutional engagements with Black communities in the United Kingdom. However, many of these attempts to decolonize have only reified white liberal perspectives of diversity and inclusion without a serious interrogation of the racist paradigms, white supremacist history, and anti-Black sentiments involved in cross-racial diagnoses of Black males within long-established disciplines and practices. Pathologizing Black men and boys as deviants through dissidence has a long history in the U.S. and U.K. Drawing from the extensive literature in Black psychology and emerging fields such as Black Male Studies, this presentation will show how societal racism and norms dictate psychological theories of Black deviance and maladjustment as well as outcomes in the diagnoses and institutionalization of Black males as a mechanism of social control.

Speakers’ Biographies

Tommy Curry is a professor, activist and public intellectual based in the School of Philosophy at The University of Edinburgh, where he is Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award. He is also the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males, entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males(Temple University Press). His book Another white Man's Burden: Josiah Royce's Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire (2018) won the Josiah Royce Award in American Idealist Thought (2020). In 2016 he re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization. Much of Curry's writing is based on combining social science research with philosophy and theory. He claims that many of the theories offered to explain the lives of Black Americans are not only incorrect but rely on outdated racist modes of thinking. As a scholar of Critical Race Theory, Curry's work focuses on the theories developed by racial realists like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, and Kenneth Nunn. He argues that idealist strands of critical race theory are unable to account for the brutal realities of Black death and dying, poverty, and de facto segregation.

Charles Brown is a member of The Guild of Psychotherapists, a UKCP Fellow, Honorary Associate member of AGIP (Association of Individual and Group Psychotherapists) and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor. He is a training psychotherapist and supervisor at The Bowlby Centre, a psychodynamic counsellor and an addiction therapist. He is a visiting lecturer at The University of East London, where he lectures on the MA Social Work course. He teaches on several psychoanalytic trainings and has a particular interest in identity.

He is the Chair of the CPJA (Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis) Race and Culture Committee and Chair of BAPPS (British Association for Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Supervisors). He has published articles and book chapters.

Image: Detail from cover image of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017) showing archive police photographs of a child detainee.