Tommy J. Curry

Black Male Studies has emerged as a new field of study that aims to correct contemporary theories of Black men and boys and provide a new conceptual grounding for future research into the sexual vulnerability of racialized male populations within Western patriarchal societies. This article introduces key concepts of Black Male Studies, as well as the literature base surrounding anti‐Black misandry, phallicism, and the role masculinization has in dehumanization and racialization more broadly. This article also analyzes foundational disagreements between Black Male Studies, Black masculinity theory, and Black feminist gender theory. The author concludes that Black Male Studies not only offers empirically testable and verifiable theories concerning Black men and boys, and racialized male populations more broadly, but can better explain historical processes and sociological findings concerning Black males than existent literature.

Intersectionality has utilized various feminist theories that continue subculture of violence thinking about Black men and boys. While intersectional feminists often claim that intersectionality leads to a clearer social analysis of power and hierarchies throughout society and within groups, the categories and claims of intersectionality fail to distinguish themselves from previously racist theories that sought to explain race, class, and gender, based on subcultural values. This article is the first to interrogate the theories used to construct the gendered categories and the assumptions behind Black male positionality under intersectional analyses. Contrary to its promises for more liberated Black identities, intersectionality merely replicates the pseudo-science of racist criminology and presents decades old theories as cutting-edge gender analyses. In short, while intersectionality has allowed Black women to create nuanced experiences and epistemological accounts of Black womanhood, the very same theory has confined Black male experience to the perpetration of violence and defined Black manhood as lesser—merely the exemplification of white masculinity’s pathological excess.

This article introduces Black Male Studies as a distinct empirically grounded field of inquiry developed to explain the systematic dehumanization, sexualization, and lethal targeting of Black men and boys within Western societies and racialized males more generally. Departing from dominant race–gender paradigms in the humanities, this introductory essay argues that feminist and intersectional theories have mischaracterized Black males as patriarchal agents or compensatory masculinists, despite extensive historical and social‐scientific evidence demonstrating their disproportionate vulnerability to incarceration, police violence, sexual victimization, economic exclusion, and premature death. Building on The Man‐Not (2017), this article advances a genre‐based antihumanist framework that conceptualizes Black males as structurally positioned outside the category of MAN—the dominant genre of the Human. Through concepts, such as anti‐Black misandry, fungibility, and phallicism, Black Male Studies reframes racism and dehumanization as a sex‐specific system of aggression. This article situates this framework as the organizing paradigm for the essays comprising this special issue.