Is Fred Hampton-style coalition building a useful praxis for contesting anti-Blackness today, or are efforts at building a “Rainbow Coalition” inappropriate or ineffective in the current historical conjuncture? Does emphasis on emancipatory efforts for black persons, and especially men, in social-political theory, sometimes undercut the need to come to terms with deeper, perhaps insurmountable anti-black structures that have created modernity, as scholars such as Frank B. Wilderson III in the afro-pessimism tradition seem to suggest? Does BMS have a reformist (or maybe even fundamentally transformative) role in higher education, especially in the United States, or is it rather a site of resistance, one that is content in the ruins of an unredeemable model of higher learning?
Today we continue our discussion on the role of BMS in the academy and in society at large with Tommy Curry, a leader and founder of the field. Curry has co-launched the first book series on BMS with Temple University Press. He is also 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, and of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018).