Black Male Studies: Addressing the Acquiescence of Theory in the Ongoing Murder of Black Men and Boys as the Matter of Introduction

ABSTRACT

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.