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This Nigger's Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck, and

the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety Toward
the Black Male Body: This Nigge....

Article in Journal of Social Philosophy · September 2017

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This Nigger’s Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck,

and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety
Toward the Black Male Body

Tommy J. Curry

Introduction

On September 23, 2015, Mr. Jeremy McDole was executed by Wilmington,

Delaware police officers. Mr. McDole was allegedly a threat to himself and sui-
cidal. The police were responding to a “911 call reporting that [Mr. McDole]
had shot himself.”1 The 911 caller can be heard yelling: “A man just shot him-
self in the AutoZone parking lot . . . he’s fallen out of a wheelchair.”2 Mr.
McDole was reported to the police as a victim, not a criminal. He was described
as a disabled man with injury. A man who was suicidal; in need of help. His
need, his victimhood, was not seen. He was not recognized by the police as a
vulnerable person. He was seen as a Black man; a threat—a body marked for
death by the danger he posed to others. This stereotype applied to his body,
despite him being confined to a wheelchair. Like the deaths of hundreds of other
Black males in America, his execution was recorded and subsequently released
to the American public for summary judgment—just or unjust killing of a Black
man. Unlike the hundreds of Black men killed every year in America, however,
Mr. McDole was paralyzed from the waist down from an injury he sustained
after being shot at the age of 18. What threat did this disabled Black man pose
to anyone? Was he armed? Did he have a gun? These are the questions that
define Black male death in this country, and despite Mr. McDole’s disability,
they now define him. Why is it so easy to frame the lives of Black men and boys
by one act, that same moment all the public sees where it is almost willed in uni-
son that these Black males are in fact yearning for death? What was it about him
being Black-male-disabled that resists consideration—did not diffuse the pre-
sumed danger—and convey that he was not a threat?
Like many academic fields, disability studies has been confronted with its
raced, classed, and gendered assumptions about the body which lies at the center
of i conceptualizations of disability. Over a decade ago, Phil Smith argued in
“Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability Studies,” that “whiteness is a nor-
mative, dominating, unexamined power that underlies the rationality of Euro-
centric culture and thought. It serves to push to the margins not only those
defined as not-white, but also those defined as not-Able.”3 Similarly, Chris
Bell’s “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” argues that

JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 48 No. 3, Fall 2017, 321–343.

C 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
V
322 Tommy J. Curry

disability studies functions to commodify Blackness as synonymous with disability.

Reflecting on the Queer disability conference held in 2002, he writes many disabled
non-whites “could not understand the overarching mentality of many of the attend-
ees, perhaps best expressed by a remark made in a breakout session: ‘Being disabled
is just like being black, so society should stop hating us and give us our rights.’ ”4
Bell clarifies in a footnote that disability studies normalizes disability such that the
white disabled body is the conceptual/anthropological origin of disabledness. Far
from excluding people of color, “White Disability Studies treats people of color as if
they were white people; as if there are no critical exigencies involved in being peo-
ple of color that might necessitate these individuals understanding and negotiating
disability in a different way from their white counterparts.”5
The white body, being the ideal type, is then the basis of distortion or dis-
figuration which defines the disabled other. The racial designation of whiteness
exceeds the borders of what is often meant by identity; who identifies or can be
identified as a white person. In actuality, whiteness speaks to something more
fundamental in the West that has come to define what it is to be human or non-
human. To be non-white is to be abnormal—evolutionarily behind—in the phy-
logenetic order of human development. Those who are raced have historically
been constructed as the degenerate/inferior/nonhuman opposite to the rational
prototype of the human/superior/(Western) (abled) human.6 An outgrowth of
nineteenth-century eugenics, “degeneration became a compelling racial meta-
phor such that the colonized races were assumed to be intrinsically degenerate,
and as a result could never be improved.”7 Degeneracy suggested biological
weakness and disease, often translating “into an attribution of diminished cogni-
tive and rational capacities of nonwhite populations.”8
In the West, these colonial accounts of abnormality became dichotomizing
anthropological designations separating those who are human from those who are
not human. Those bodies whose origin are thought to share a phylogenic distance
from European man have been thought to be the embodiment of pathology,
degeneracy, and racial inferiority. As a kind of abnormality, disability was consid-
ered to be unnatural and detestable, while normality became synonymous with
that which was natural and a means “of establishing the universal, unquestionable
good and right.”9 The moral constitution of the self, the interior character one pos-
sesses, became associated with the physical and mental formation of the body.
Oyèronke Oyew umı argues that under Western epistemology, “The body is given
a logic all its own. It is believed that just by looking at it one can tell a person’s
beliefs and social position or lack thereof.”10 Because “the body is the bedrock on
which social order is founded, the body is always in view and on view,”11 so the
somatological becomes intuitive; that which is obvious when gazed upon. In the
West, sight analyzes the body, and becomes the instrument used to identify bio-
logical deficiency which is thought to indicate degeneracy and inferiority. In this
circuitous epistemology, the deformity of the body is a reflection upon the sup-
posed distortion of the mind, just as the distortion of the mind suggests the savage
degeneracy of the body.
 This Nigger’s Broken 323

In “Pathology to Power: Rethinking Race, Poverty and Disability,” Pamela

Block, Fabricio Balcazar, and Christopher Keys explain that, even in the
twenty-first century, “the concept of disability, when applied as a medical or
psychological diagnosis, can subsume the culturally, socially, and historically
derived identity of an individual beneath a label of pathology.”12 Despite the
supposedly progressive social conscience of the American public, and the seem-
ingly infinite theoretical nuances in identity theory, there is an anthropological,
and dare I say, ontological problem, which continues to re-emerge as the basis
of engaging those bodies perceived as disabled. This risk of being reduced to the
perception and anxieties of others is only amplified by the vulnerabilities racial
groups have in mainstream society. Whereas “white individuals with disabilities
can recognize that their disability is the main reason why they are discriminated
against, segregated, and oppressed, [disabled minority groups] have a harder
time separating or consolidating their multiple identities.”13 Non-whites experi-
ence “segregation and discrimination independent of their disability. If we also
consider the fact that poverty is a major source of marginalization and that most
individuals of color with disabilities are poor, then the experience of disability is
only one more factor in an already oppressed existence.”14
But what of Black males? Despite over a decade of work identifying the
whiteness and bourgeois assumptions in disability theory, there has not been any
attempt to create specific theories of Black male disability which engages the
vulnerabilities his body has to death, hyper-sexualization, and super-humanism
in America. Even Nirmala Erevelles’s work, which does an excellent job articu-
lating the link between colonial concepts of inferiority, be they racial or cultural,
misses the opportunity to fully articulate the vulnerabilities racialized maleness
has within her transnational feminist disability studies perspective.15 This is not
to suggest Erevelles does not engage the disabled Black male body. The concern
she conveys for her husband Robert who was suffering with a grade IV brain
tumor is a startling reminder of how the Black male body is perceived as a dan-
ger regardless of its actual physical state. As a Black male, I understand her
relief when she tells the reader how lucky they both felt that most of Robert’s
seizures occurred in the privacy of their own home.16 I know her fear, the repeti-
tive terror she experienced imagining her husband being shot or killed because
the public did not know how to react to a Black male body seizing. Erevelles is
correct: “The Black male body . . . is a source of terror in white patriarchal soci-
ety, and when transformed during a grand mal seizure—with rolled back eyes,
harsh grunting sounds, mouth drooling bloody foam, and the occasional loss of
control of bodily function with its associated putrid smell—could become an
even more terrifying spectacle as a result of the now lethal triple combination of
race, gender, and disability.”17 But what conditions the maleness of this Black
disabled body? What is the role Black man plays in Erevelles’s knowledge that
“to be perceived as a dangerous black man in the wrong place at the wrong time
. . . could result in death,”18 and the public’s fear that even a disabled Black man
is Black and male enough to pose a threat?
324 Tommy J. Curry

There is an asserted claim in gender theory holding that maleness need not
have a separate theoretical account as an attribute of the racial body, as it repre-
sents privilege, domination, and hegemony in its relation to femaleness.19 For
many, acknowledging the horror the Black male body conveys is enough, but
the lack of an explanatory account as to why the Black male body is peculiarly
dehumanized within patriarchal racial logics leaves the multiple levels of vul-
nerability Black males experience unexplored and untheorized. While it is obvi-
ous to many that Black males are seen as dangerous, it is often unacknowledged
that Black men and boys have a long history of being victims of rape, sexual
violence, and cannibalism.20 Black maleness is easily acknowledged as being
the cause of white aggression and violence, but these ignored violence(s), which
exist in the sexual register, are thought to be of no consequence to how Black
men and boys are perceived, desired, and feared.21 This essay attempts to rem-
edy this deficit in theory how the Black male body generally, and the disabled
Black male body more specifically, is engaged as a phobia-inspiring entity.
Because the Black male body is confined to the realm of terror—a living corpo-
real horror—I argue the recognition of physical or mental disability by white
onlookers is subsumed by white fear. In other words, disability in the Black
male is unrecognizable by whites because of a very real racial anxiety.

The Black Man as Phobogenic Object:

The Nigger as the Catalyst of White Anxiety

In Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues that “not only must the Black
man be Black; he must he Black in relation to the white man.”22 This sexual relation
between the Black male and his white male counterpart does not usually register in
academic conceptualization of racialized maleness. Sylvia Wynter explains that
under colonialism “the primary code of difference now became that between ‘men’
and ‘natives,’ with the traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ distinctions now coming to
play a secondary—if none the less powerful—reinforcing role within the system of
symbolic representations.”23 Because the Black man is differentiated into a separate
species in the colonial order, there is no shared gender. This is why Fanon contends
that under the colonial circumstance “the earliest values are different in the white
man and in the Black man.”24 The Black man lives in the world as the reflection of
white society’s fear. He is, as Fanon says, “a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anx-
iety.”25 He is terror in the white mind. The fear the Black man represents—his sight,
imagining him as a sex partner—is the origin of white violence against him. The
mere contact with his Blackened body activates the neurosis of the white mind
whereby the physical proximity the white observer has to the Black male body trig-
gers a fleeing of the white mind from the reality, or more accurately the relation to
Blackness, the white body cannot escape. Fanon’s psycho-sexual schema has much
relevance for our investigation into Black maleness and the phantasm created by the
fear of the Black male historically referred to as the Nigger.
 This Nigger’s Broken 325

The Nigger is the final product of the psychological process Fanon calls
phobogenesis in whites. While scholars have become comfortable with the prov-
ocation Fanon offers in “The Fact of Blackness,” the pointing out of the “Dirty
Nigger” is a clue Fanon offers the reader that extends beyond the perils of
Blackness generally toward a more particular masculine ontology of the Nig-
ger—the anxiety the Black male body causes within the white gaze. It is not
only that the Black male is disassembled when he is looked upon by whites,
where his being is “sealed into the crushing objecthood” of white sight,26 but
that the Nigger is the name of the fear birthed into flesh by the white mind. This
fear is made actual and real, made into a body, before the very eyes of whites.
When the young white boy yells “Look at the Nigger . . . Mama, a Negro . . .
Hell, he’s getting mad,”27 the Nigger is a masculine caricature, a fact noted by
the white boy’s use of the word he, who becomes real through the fear he experi-
ences as a young white boy observing the monstrosity he only understands as
the Nigger. The white mind offers the Black male a distorted body back to him,
one tattered and torn, made to fit their (white) nightmares rather than his actual
person. The fear of whites then imposes itself on Black males, forcing Black
men and boys to struggle against white delusion to achieve social recognition.
The Nigger has no external reality separate from the meanings the white mind
attributes to him. Every action and sentiment is given meaning within the anxi-
ety the white mind generates in this encounter with the Nigger.

The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a
nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the lit-
tle boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold,
that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he
thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his
mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.28

To the white mind, the Black man is not actually experiencing the world, or
acting and reacting to its stimulus and conditions. In the apperception of the
Black male, the thing emerging from this mental act is already determined to act
and intend what the white delusional needs for his world to cohere. The fear of a
Black man determines all of his physiological reaction to be aggression toward
whites. As in Fanon’s analysis, the Nigger is not cold; he is enraged. He intends
to eat the child because he is an animal or beast. These descriptions tell us the
extent of white anxiety where the objecthood of the Black male is cognitively
assigned by the white mind’s experiencing of the Nigger.
How then do we explain this anxiety which manifests as a psychopathology
that saw Mr. McDole draw a gun, or would have whites believe a Black man
having a seizure was a danger to them? Fanon turns to Angelo Hesnard’s
L’Univers Morbide de la Faute. Relying on Hesnard, Fanon describes phobia as
“a neurosis characterized by the anxious fear of an object (in the broadest sense
of anything outside the individual) or, by extension of a situation.”29 Fanon then
326 Tommy J. Curry

turns to Charles Odier’s Anxiety and Magical Thinking to show that “insecurity
can produce a most overwhelming anxiety in the absence of any actual or objective
danger.”30 Odier stresses that “anxiety is related to the memory of a lived traumatic
situation. This implies that the subjective value of a phenomenon by far exceeds
the objective value. Even if a constant physiological basis can be found in the psy-
chogenic anxiety, it is the psychic element that is predominant and determining.”31
Fanon shows the reader that the Black male exists as the construction of the white
mind, not that he actual is any of these phobias or fears, but that he appears to be
these things in a society that shares these phobias culturally.
The primitivity imposed upon the Black male robs him of the potential to ever
be innocent, rational, or human. The Black male is caricatured in being perceived.
He is not recognized by the white, but distorted by white apperception. The carica-
ture created by white anxiety is imposed upon him and is his actual (non)being to
the white mind. He (his physical existence) is subsumed by the various negativities
of Blackness housed in the white mind; the caricature is what emerges from this
conceptual consumption. Although these delusions do not belong to him, and have
no actual correspondence to his physical body, the reality—the material fact—that
the caricature is not actually being him has no effect on white perceptions of what
he in fact is. In defining him as savage, he is imagined to not only be outside civili-
zation, but a threat to it. He is not simply othered, but made nonexistent; reconfig-
ured as whites see fit to justify his subjugation or extermination. He is created by
the society and accepted by its citizens as a threat to their very existence. He is
policed so that order can be maintained. This is not simply a racial issue in the
sense that it is only white society that sees the Black male as a danger, but a prob-
lem of how poor Black men and boys like Mr. McDole are defined in this society.
Mr. McDole was killed because there was an acceptance of the white phobias
that serve to define the poor Black male. The criminalization of Black men and
boys denies Black males the ability to ever be acknowledged as victims of violence,
so his trauma and suffering were imperceptible. The association of Black males
with animals, specifically apes and monkeys, diminishes our sympathies for their
humanity; caricatures found to not only increase the propensity for, but also the
acceptance of, greater levels of violence directed toward them. Phillip A. Goff’s
implicit bias research has explained that the association between the Negro and the
ape is not simply an abstract and detached stereotype, but rather a historical trope
used to justify the dehumanization of Black people which is “a method by which
individuals and social groups are targeted for cruelty, social degradation, and state-
sanctioned violence.”32 Recent implicit bias studies have shown that Fanon’s analy-
sis of phobogenesis is in fact correct. Police officers do in fact perceive Black men
and boys as less human and more immediate and dangerous threats.33
Black male death and dying is the result of this engineered societal pro-
gram, and the machinations of this apparatus obscure and in many cases deny
our ability to see the lives of Black men and boys as they actually are—human,
fragile, and vulnerable. In a very real sense, Black maleness is a state of constant
deprivation. The personality and character of Black men and boys are vacated
 This Nigger’s Broken 327

and replaced by the delusional fears of whites. This is a process of dehumanization;

a logic that continues to cost Black men and boys their very lives. Black males are
often described as enraged or possessing superhuman characteristics. Darren Wil-
son, the murderer of Michael Brown, actually testified before a grand jury that
“when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old
holding onto Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan, that’s just how big he felt and how small I
felt just from grasping his arm.”34 Describing his fear of Michael Brown, Wilson
said “At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots,
like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was
looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his
way.”35 Darren Wilson simply attributes mythical threats to Michael Brown. He
imagines him as stronger than himself, and able to run through bullets. He simply
imposes the caricature he has of the Black male upon Mr. Brown to rationalize his
need to kill a young Black boy. As I have argued previously, there is no reasoning
with the designators created by whites that mark Black males for death.36 They are
pre-rational in the most literal sense of the word in that they originate in subjective
traumas that have no resolution in the real world. Black males simply are these car-
icatures to whites, and as such they are a risk to be exterminated, since this is the
means by which the white man and woman attempt to conquer and triumph over
their fears. In this sense, the death of Black males is the cathartic act establishing
harmony between (the fear created in) the white mind and (the yearning for the
security of) the white self.

The Disabled Man as Buck: Interrogating the Conceptual

Denials of Disability in Black Males

Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird has become a somewhat

common example of epistemic injustice used by philosophers of late. In many
ways, the novel demonstrates the vulnerability Black males have to white fears,
but at another level the story of Tom Robinson identifies the “conceptual
impossibility” of Black males being seen as disabled and vulnerable to the phys-
ical or sexual violence of able-bodied whites. Tom Robinson has been used as a
sort of provocation in many of these readings. He is a 25-year-old Black man,
married to a Black woman named Helen, and the father of three children. In
place of philosophical analyses that seek to examine the character of Mr. Robin-
son, and the improbability of the rape act being committed due to Mr. Robin-
son’s disability, the philosophical interest is made hypothetical—should we
believe (can we believe) that a Black man is innocent of raping a white girl,
named Mayella Ewell?
The Black male rapist is foreshadowed by Scout asking, “What is rape?”
The reader is immediately thrown upon their own cognitive devices to explain
the vulnerability of women to men in this question. When Atticus tells Scout
that rape is “the carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent,”37
the reader’s mind fills with scenarios to give context and confirmation to the
328 Tommy J. Curry

question asked. The weight of this definition is felt during Mr. Heck Tate’s testi-
mony at the trial of Tom Robinson. Mr. Tate recalls, “It was the night of
November 21st. I was just leaving my office to go home when B—Mr. Ewell
came in, very excited he was, and said get out his house quick some nigger’d
raped his girl.”38 Tate then asked Mayella who hurt her and she said it was Tom
Robinson.39 Pamela Barnett argues in Dangerous Desire that “sexed bodies are
most insistently gendered in narratives of rape; a Black man is Blackest and a
white woman is white-est when represented in the dominant narrative of inter-
racial rape.”40 Barnett continues that Mayella Ewell is uncertainly raced before
the accusation of rape, but “progressively whitening with the telling of the
story.”41 This whitening and presentation of innocence is hastened by the prose-
cution calling Robert E. Lee Ewell, Mayella’s father, to the stand.
Harper Lee takes great care to announce the pretense of Robert Ewell’s
claim to racial superiority over Blacks. The Ewells are described as a lower
caste family, so close to the bottom of the white class structure that they bor-
dered the color line, the racial division between whites and Blacks in the segre-
gated South. As Scout impresses upon the reader,

Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells. No economic fluctuations
changed their status—people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as
well as in the depth of a depression. No truant officers could keep their numerous off-
spring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various
worms, and the disease indigenous to filthy surroundings.42

The economic position of the Ewells was identical to that of Blacks in May-
comb. The Ewells lived “behind the town garbage dump in what was once a
Negro cabin,”43 a home no more than five hundred yards from a Negro settle-
ment.44 This picture of the Ewells came to Scout’s mind as Robert Ewell began
to speak. Robert Ewell was a little white man who only differed from his Black
neighbors in that “if scrubbed with lye soap in a very hot water, his skin was
white.”45
When Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor, asked Robert Ewell “what happened on
the evening of November 21st?”46 Robert Ewell replied, “Mayella was scream-
ing like a stuck hog inside the house . . . Mayella was raising this holy racket so
I dropped m’load and ran as fast as I could but I run into th’ fence, but when I
got disentangled I run up to th’ window—and I seen that Black nigger [Tom
Robinson] ruttin on my Mayella.”47 Adamant and now pointing at Mr. Robin-
son, Robert Ewell named Tom Robinson; the rapist. This pointing to Tom Rob-
inson is not only a racial identification, but a sexual division between Robert
Ewell as a white man and Tom Robinson as a Nigger. This is the phobogenic
division in kind, between white man and Black man, articulated by Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks. The Black man is speciated from the white man by the
act of rape which arises from the nature imposed upon him by whites. The Black
man is the rapist, the white man is he who then punishes the Nigger for his
 This Nigger’s Broken 329

transgressions against the social order, despite it being asserted that it is simply
the nature of the Nigger to crave the white woman. This is part of Robert
Ewell’s appeal to the court. Robert Ewell claims to have seen Tom Robinson
having sexual intercourse with Mayella.48 He identifies Mr. Robinson as part of
a racial problem and the dangers Blacks pose to white folk like him. Ewell iden-
tifies Robinson by where he lived, in that nigger-nest, the same nigger-nest he
had asked the county to clean out because “they’re dangerous to live around,
sides devaluin’ my property.”49 One can sense the irony Lee presents to the
reader as a poor white man, living in a cabin formerly occupied by Blacks
behind a garbage dump, who suggests that the Blacks who live down the street
from him are bringing down his property’s value. Even more, the reader is given
a glimpse of the Ewells’ racial frame used to explain the presumed distance
between him and the Blacks who live down the street from him. While the
Ewells live in close proximity to Blacks, a marker of their class position, they
are fundamentally different because Blacks are dangerous to Ewell and his
children.
Mr. Gilmer then called Mayella Ewell to the stand. Mayella’s story began
with her establishing her femininity. She “burst into tears” and began sobbing.50
After she regained her composure she explains that her only engagement with
Tom Robinson was as labor. Robert Ewell brought an old chiffarobe for kindling
and told Mayella to chop it up. Mayella says she did not feel strong enough to
complete the task so she told Mr. Robinson, “Come here, Nigger, and bust up
this chiffarobe for me, I gotta nickel for you.”51 No sooner had she gone into the
house to retrieve the nickel for Mr. Robinson, Mayella said, “I turned around an
had ’fore I knew it he was on me. Just run up behind me . . . got me round the
neck . . . and hit me agin an’ agin.”52 Her tears conveyed to the court her sexual
vulnerability to the Black man who stood before them accused. It was now
Atticus Finch’s turn to cross examine. He asked Mayella Ewell, “Do you
remember him beating you in the face?”53 Mayella hesitated, switching between
“yes” and “no” before she committed firmly to her previous testimony that Mr.
Robinson hit her, grabbed her, choked her, and then raped her. This was the
moment Atticus Finch anticipated, the moment he believed Mayella Ewell
would be revealed as a liar. Mr. Finch asked Mr. Robinson to stand. As Mr.
Robinson rose to his feet, he seemed “oddly off balance.”54 It was not because
of his posture, but in fact his arm. “His left arm was fully twelve inches shorter
than his right, and hung dead at his side.”55 As a young boy Mr. Robinson’s arm
got caught in a cotton gin on Dolphus Raymond’s plantation. It “tore all the
muscles loose from the bone.”56 He almost bled to death.
Atticus Finch again asked Mayella, “Is this the man who raped you?”57
Confronted with Mr. Robinson’s disability—his cripple-ness—Mayella was lost
for words: “It most certainly is . . . I don’t know how he done it, but he done
it.”58 The physical impossibility of the assault described by Mayella left little
comfort in the mind of the white Southerners deliberating the case. Atticus
Finch then called Mr. Tom Robinson to the stand. His disability now fully on
330 Tommy J. Curry

display, Scout remarked that “Tom was a black-velvet Negro, not shiny, but soft
black velvet . . . If he had been whole, he would have been a specimen of a
man.”59 Though broken, he was perceived in the courtroom and before the white
public as if he was more than capable of the crime for which he had been
accused. He stood before a white Southern town, crippled and physically unable
to be a rapist, but was cast as such without doubt. When Robinson took the stand,
he explained that it was Mayella who physically assaulted him. Mr. Robinson
told the court, Mayella “grabbed me . . . grabbed me round th’ legs. She scared
me so bad I hopped down . . . and she jumped on me.”60 Atticus Finch asked
“Then what did she do?”61 “She reached up and kissed me . . . She said she never
kissed a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger.”62 “She says
what papa do to her don’t count.”63 “She said: Kiss me back, Nigger.”64 Mr.
Robinson tried to escape, but the abled-bodied white teenager put her back to the
door and would not let him pass. This is when Mayella’s father saw what she
did, and she was confronted in her failed attempt to seduce a Nigger. This is
what enraged Robert Ewell, causing him to call her a whore and beat her for her
racial transgression; her desire to become intimate with a Black man.65 This is
why Mr. Robinson claimed he did not rape her, he did not harm her, and he
resisted her advances. What else could a disabled Black man do?
Frantz Fanon once wrote, “In relation to the Negro, everything takes place
on the genital level.”66 The white world asserts that the Black male is a sexual
brute. This is all that he is in the mind of the white woman. His mere presence
around the white female creates the conditions for rape, not because it is what
he desires or intends, but it is what is called forth by the fear-desire-anxiety of
the white woman. As Fanon explains, “Contact alone is enough to evoke anxi-
ety. For contact is at the same time the basic schematic type of initiating sexual
action (touching, caresses-sexuality).”67 The white woman’s fantasy of sexual
contact with the Black man belongs to her, but is often explained as the effect of
his desire toward her body. She desires to be desired by the Black male. It is her
possession of her own body, the claiming of her flesh, beyond the objectification
of her own race’s cultural frame that is thought to free her—to be her agency. In
this sense, she does not understand that her fear of rape is her projection onto
the Black male; instead, the white woman, through the sexual power she com-
mands as a woman averse to sexual contact with a Nigger, makes her sexual
anxiety his nature. Recognizing this neurosis, Fanon asks, “Are we not now
observing a complete inversion? Basically, does this fear of rape not itself cry
out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of
women who ask to be raped?”68 Many scholars seem to deliberately avoid
Fanon’s point concerning rape. Within the colonial situation, rape is the only
sex that occurs between the white colonizer and the Black native. As such, there
is no consensual relation that is possible with the inferior Black male. The fan-
tasy of sex with a Black man is not able to occur in a context, be it actual or
imaginary, that places him in equality with the white woman. The consequence
is that the white woman cries out for rape, what any and all sex with the Black
 This Nigger’s Broken 331

man would be. Some may find still Fanon’s question provocative given his insis-
tent on the degree to which the sexual aversion white women demonstrate
against the Black male is manifested, but there is corroboration in E. Franklin
Frazier’s study of the Black male in the Southern racial caste system.
Similar to Fanon’s account of Negro phobogenesis in Black Skin, White
Masks, Frazier’s “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” explains that “just as in the
insane any pertinent stimulus may arouse the whole complex, so any idea con-
nected with the Negro causes the whole Negro-complex to be projected into
consciousness.”69 In the South, a geo-cultural space mirroring the colonial con-
dition, the Negro-complex is a “system of ideas which most Southerners have
respecting the Negro, which has the same intense emotional tone that character-
izes insane complexes.”70 Frazier argues that Southerners imagine the Negro
male to be the savage incarnation of white sexual inhibitions. This is especially
strong in regard to the white female’s desire for the Negro male. In response to
the rape myths which accompanied pursuits for racial equality, Frazier writes:

Perhaps more justly to be classed as symptoms of insanity are those frequent hallucina-
tions of white women who complain of attacks by Negroes when clearly no Negroes are
involved. Hallucinations often represent unacceptable sexual desires which are projected
when they can no longer be repressed. In the South a desire on the part of a white woman
for a Negro that could no longer be repressed would most likely be projected— especially
when such a desire is supposed to be as horrible as incest. It is not unlikely, therefore,
that imaginary attacks by Negroes are often projected wishes.71

Consider the implication of Frazier’s findings. If the Black male is the accumu-
lation of the fear and repressed fantasies of whites such that any contact with him
produces insanity, where the casting of their delusion becomes his actuality, then
the Black male cannot escape the racist sentiments of society, since he is presented
to the white consciousness as that which they hold/desire as morally condemnable.
This delusional caricature explains the role the Buck has historically played in ratio-
nalizing the barbarity Black males have come to represent in America.
The Buck has been the American trope of Black male sexuality since slav-
ery. The caricature arose as “a white gender convention . . . encoding white male
fears of Black [male] sexuality in particular and of virility in general.”72
Throughout the early twentieth century, Bucks were imagined as the social and
political enemies of whites. D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) articulated
the then contemporary fear whites had of Black men as a threat to the at large
security of society. “Bucks are always big bad Niggers, oversexed and savage,
violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.”73 The white mind sees them as
“psycho-paths . . . panting, salivating . . . stiffening his body as if the mere pres-
ence of a white woman in the room could bring him to sexual climax.”74 The
Black male affected by this caricature is thought to be “dominated by an uncivi-
lized or savage sexuality . . . incapable of civilized restraint.”75 What is most rel-
evant to our theorization of Tom Robinson however is “how the Buck image
332 Tommy J. Curry

removed the blame from certain white women involved in intimate relationships
with black men.”76 Like Robinson, there is an assumed inclination in the Black
male that pulls him towards rape. Because this is an animalistic lust, physical or
mental capacity is thought to be irrelevant to the carrying out of the Buck’s des-
tiny. The assault, and in this case Tom Robinson being physically restrained by
Mayella Ewell, since she would not let him leave, is ignored and thought to be
irrelevant to the ontology which holds Black males to be rapists. Regardless of
her actions, he will remain the rapist and she can only be his victim.

The Need for a Black Male Center: Explaining the Deficiencies of

Epistemic Deficit, and the Limits of Medina’s Social Imaginary

Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing

argues for interpreting Tom Robinson’s conviction as the triumph of “the
assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are
basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not trusted around our wom-
en.”77 In other words, Tom Robinson was convicted because the jurors suc-
cumbed to the “automatic distrust delivered by the prejudice that structured
their perception of the speaker.”78 Tom Robinson’s case represents an extreme
example of the sort of testimonial injustice Fricker attempts to situate as prejudi-
cial credibility deficit,79 a condition where “the speaker sustains such a testimo-
nial injustice if and only if she receives a credibility deficit owing to identity
prejudice in the hearer.”80 Unlike prejudices that are incidental, based on the
local incidences of prejudice against a speaker, “testimonial injustices that are
connected, via a common prejudice, with other types of injustice, might appro-
priately be termed systematic.”81 Systematic testimonial injustices are “those
prejudices that ‘track’ the subject through different dimensions of social activ-
ity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, religious, and
so on.”82 These testimonial injustices, however, are not simply directed toward
abstract and nebulous groups, but toward the individuals which comprise them.
As such, Fricker names such prejudices identity prejudices, or “the main type
(the only type?) of prejudice that tracks people . . . relating to social identity.”83
Tom Robinson was not believed, according to Fricker, because

racial identity power is exercised in this way by members of the jury as they make their
deflated credibility judgements of Tom Robinson, with the result that he is unable to con-
vey to them the knowledge he has of what happened at the Ewells’ place. This is the
essential exercise of identity power in the courtroom that seals Tom’s fate, though of
course it is not the whole story, for this operation of identity power is crucially supported
by Mr. Gilmer’s simple but highly effective prosecution strategy, which is to invoke the
usual collective negative imaginings of the Negro.84

Jose Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance suggests a different reading

of Tom Robinson’s case. Whereas Fricker’s analysis of Tom Robinson’s trial
 This Nigger’s Broken 333

offers an account of Robinson’s lack of epistemic credibility, or his credibility

deficit in front of a white court room, Medina believes “what stands in the way
of achieving justice in the case of Tom Robinson goes beyond testimonial credi-
bility.”85 There is also the problem of the credibility excesses possessed by the
white jurors, lawyers, and judge. As Medina correctly notes, “The depiction of
Tom Robinson as a presumptuous, lying Negro . . . becomes successful not
exclusively because of what happens in Tom’s interrogation, but also in part
thanks to the credibility excess antecedently given to his accuser as a member of
a privileged racial group (despite her economic underprivileged status).”86
These credibility hierarchies were in place well before the trial of Tom Robin-
son even began, according to Medina. The trial merely allowed an all-white jury
to impose their presumption that whites are more authorial and trustworthy than
a Black man.87
The interplay between credibility deficit and excess are not the only dynam-
ics which complicate the original analysis offered by Fricker. In fact, Medina
believes that “the central problem is not that Tom Robinson’s testimonial
authority is discredited, but rather that certain affects and relations have been
rendered incredible (in fact, almost unintelligible) in that culture; and achieving
justice becomes practically impossible in that culture until those affects and
relations become imaginable, until they can be thought meaningfully and those
who lay claim to them do not become discredited by their very claims.”88 The
impossibility is not whether or not Tom Robinson is a “credible knower and
informer,”89 but the offense Robinson commits against the racial order of the
South by “feeling sorry for a white girl.”90 Medina interprets Tom Robinson as
fantastical in that he represent an impossible relation to Mayella. Not only does
he pity this white woman, but he refuses her sexual advances. Medina argues
that “Atticus Finch’s insinuation that it was Mayella who made sexual advances
against Tom . . . was something that was completely outside the bounds of the
social imaginary of white Southerners at the time.”91
The social imaginary is a horizon of sorts which serves as the limit to what
individuals or groups consider as possible and somewhat probable.92 Medina’s
analysis does push the reader to imagine the possibility that Mayella sexually
approached Mr. Robinson as a corrective to the social imaginary of a racist
1930s Alabama where “the epistemic obstacle is the unimaginability of a white
girl coming on to a Negro.”93 Considering the white woman as a sexual aggres-
sor asks the jury to consider that which is impossible—a white woman who
wanted a Nigger. In this situation, Medina argues that the jurors were faced with
a “choice between an easily imaginable, ready-made scenario (a white girl being
raped by a Negro) and something unimaginable coupled with something imagin-
able but shattering (the white girl desiring a Negro and being physically abused
and possibly raped by her own father).” This unimaginability (the exceeding of
the social imaginary of the day) “produces active ignorance by circulating dis-
torted scripts about sexual desire according to which Negroes have a sexual
agency out of control whereas white women lack sexual agency,” by Medina’s
334 Tommy J. Curry

account.94 Consequently, the jury convicts Tom Robinson because they are epi-
stemically lazy and complicit with the dominant racial ideologies of their
time.95 The closed-mindedness of the white jurors inhibits the epistemic friction
necessary to show that Tom Robinson has a legitimate perspective that must be
considered. He is convicted without ever being “considered to have a legitimate
alternative framing of the issue.”96
Medina then suggests though Mayella Ewell is certainly an important con-
tributor to the epistemic and legal injustice against Tom Robinson, it is clear
that Mayella is also “a victim (a victim of sexual abuse and of a racist and sexual
ideology), and her voice is also inhibited and diminished and clearly coerced to
lie—to hide and dissimulate—about those things that the culturally dominant
mindset defends itself against and the social imaginary rejects.”97 Though
Mayella Ewell’s lies are responsible for Tom Robinson’s imprisonment and
death, she is thought to be victimized by the same system which oppresses Tom
Robinson, the innocent disabled Black man killed by the end of the novel.
Medina suggests that “both Tom and Mayella belong to hermeneutically mar-
ginalized groups and their voices and perspectives are unfairly treated because
they are subject to a situated hermeneutical inequality.”98 Medina’s account of
hermeneutic marginalization draws from Fricker’s definition of hermeneutic
injustice as “a collective hermeneutical gap [that] prevents members of a group
from making sense of an experience that it is in their interest to render
intelligible.”99 As hermeneutically marginalized subjects, Tom and Mayella are
thought to “enter communicative interactions at a disadvantage,”100 because
they are “conceptually ill-equipped to make sense of certain things, and they are
disproportionately more likely to be ill-understood.”101 Ultimately, Medina
argues that “the wrong done to them as witnesses, the testimonial injustice, is
only an effect of a broader and deeper epistemic injustice they have to endure
. . . by virtue of belonging to social groups—blacks and women—who cannot
talk about certain things . . . without their intelligibility (and hence validity of all
their claims) being called into question.”102 Because Tom and Mayella are con-
ceptualized as (hermeneutical) equals in a certain sense in that their ability to
articulate and make intelligible their own experiences is repressed by certain
aspects of the dominant white and presumably male culture in which they reside
in the 1930s, they are presented as silenced and distorted as knowers or perhaps
more importantly as testifiers of their own realities—be it their desires (as in the
case of Mayella) or vulnerabilities (as in the case of Mr. Robinson).
As Shelley Tremain argues in “Knowing Disability Differently,” the analy-
ses of these phenomena that “Fricker and Medina have produced remain incom-
plete insofar as neither philosopher makes more than a passing reference to the
fact that Lee’s character Tom Robinson is disabled.”103 Tremain is correct to
note that “because Robinson is a Black disabled man, however, he confronts
contempt when he expresses such sentiments for a white woman. In other words,
that Robinson himself cannot be an object of pity or even sympathy racializes
him with respect to disability.” Disability is secondary in the epistemological
 This Nigger’s Broken 335

analyses put forth by Fricker and Medina. What categories establish power over
the other’s body in the relationship between an able-bodied 19-year-old white
girl and a disabled Black male? What assumptions does the epistemologist bring
to the observation? Medina is so easily moved toward sympathy for Mayella
Ewell that it deserves inquiry. He speculates that Mayella herself could have
been a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father.104 It is true that Mayella
comments that the kisses her father demands are not real, so there may be some
truth to Medina’s intuition. But if the insinuation of her father making her kiss
him leads one toward the idea that she may be sexually abused by her father,
then why is it that the very same actions committed by Mayella towards a Black
man, “telling him to kiss her back, nigger,” do not constitute the possibility of
the same sexual offense?
Tom Robinson lived in a time when Black men were deathly fearful of
white women. Jim Crow established that any offense to a white woman was
grounds for death by lynching.105 Black males were forced to be eunuchs in
order to survive their engagement with white women. This dynamic fundamen-
tally challenges the supposed order and what was or was not imaginable in the
Southern states during the 1930s. Even if the white public knew that Mayella
had sexually assaulted Mr. Robinson, their actions would have been no different.
They intentionally preserved the order of the South. This was not a moral ques-
tion; it was a decision to control the economic and political station of Black peo-
ple for the economic and political gain of white people. The disabled body of
Tom Robinson simply conveys to the reader the dedication white Alabamians
have to this order, not their ignorance of it. Stated differently, the white public is
not closed-minded or ignorant of racism and epistemic friction; they are aware
of the social order, their racial advantage and their individual duties within it.
Tom Robinson was merely a victim of this white woman’s sexual appetite and
the response of a white supremacist system which sought to maintain her race’s
sexual mores.
Part of what is missing from Medina’s analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird is
a historical contextualization of the power relations between Black males and
white females in the South. Because Medina’s analysis is a formal investigation
into the characteristics which serve to exacerbate or inhibit one’s authorial
claims as trustworthy and true, he completely disregards the historical power
white women have exercised over Black males. A blindness which results in an
ill-formed theory that not only erases the victimization of Mr. Tom Robinson
specifically, but Black males more generally. Historically, white women’s sex-
ual and political aspirations have been tied to an intricate, but ignored, exercise
of racial and sexual violence against Black men.
During slavery, white women used rape to dominate Black male slaves.
These white women would coerce Black men into prolonged sexual relation-
ships, routinely raping them for their own sexual pleasure. Enslaved mulatto
men were of particular interest to white women. As Thomas Foster notes in
“The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” “the sexual abuse
336 Tommy J. Curry

of ‘nearly white’ men could enable white women to enact radical fantasies of
domination over white men with the knowledge that their victim’s body was
legally black and enslaved, subject to the women’s control.”106 If their sexual
exploits were ever discovered, they would simply appeal to the racist calculus
holding Black men to be rapists, and white women to be too pure and white to
ever sexually desire a Black male. While our present understanding of white
womanhood sees them to be always sexually vulnerable to (predatory) Black
men, within American slavery “white women of the planter class were certainly
able to wield power over black men, although all white women could coerce
enslaved black men given the legal and social setting in which they lived.
Planter-class women might more easily and more believably have persuaded the
community to view them as innocent victims of their sexual contact with black
men.”107
During Reconstruction, white women were not only presumed innocent in
any possible contact they had with Black men; they were defined as such regard-
less of their class position in society. Even when whites knew that the sex
between a Black man and a white woman was consensual, or in the case of
Edward Coy “rested upon a yearlong liaison with a white woman,”108 the Black
man had to be lynched for the protection of white womanhood nonetheless. Mar-
tha Hodes explains in White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th Century
South that “without slavery to differentiate blacks from poor whites, it was
equally important that the ideas about the purity of white women included poor
white women. For to characterize all white women as pure had an important
effect: it made sex between a black man and a white woman by definition rape,
because a ’pure’ white woman, no matter how poor, could not possibly (in white
minds) desire sex with a black man.”109 Recounting Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s orig-
inal findings, historian Paula Giddings explains that white women often initiated
sexual contact with Black men. Black men had little recourse to such aggres-
sions by white women. As Giddings explains:

Wells gave an example of a lynch victim who had tried to escape the advances of his
boss’s daughter, even to the point of quitting his job. The woman pursued him, however,
and when they were discovered together, the girl charged rape. In another instance, Wells
investigated a case in Indianola, Mississippi, where a man was lynched after allegedly
raping an eight-year-old girl. The girl, Wells discovered, was not eight but eighteen and
had been a frequent visitor to the Black man’s cabin.110

Contrary to Medina’s assertion of white women’s hermeneutical marginali-

zation whereby they could not express their desire for Black men within the
social imaginary of the 1930s South, white women utilized their sexual vulnera-
bility and racist mythology as a means to maintain their virtue while sexually
coercing Black males for their own pleasure. Throughout the early twentieth
century, white women used their sexual power over Black men to derail the
political progress of the Black race as a whole. The myth of the Black rapist was
 This Nigger’s Broken 337

used to show the barbarism of the Negro and the need for white violence against
Blacks. This is a strategy that coincidently placed the white woman at the center
of Southern politics under Jim Crow, and justified their political power over
Black men throughout the South. As Crystal Feimster notes in Southern Hor-
rors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, “white women’s participa-
tion as actors and audience at lynchings had opened up a wider space for them
in public and commercial life. If they could lynch they could do anything.. . .
From demanding legal protection to participating in mob violence, the new
southern woman exercised all the privileges of white supremacy to demand
women’s rights.”111
Quite to the contrary of Medina’s position, white women were not herme-
neutically disadvantaged in ways similar to Blacks because they were women.
Their social position as white women allowed them to disguise their sexual will
to rape as an impossibility, whereas Black men were thought to be untrustworthy
concerning rape because it was in their nature to do so. Because the white
woman was situated as particularly vulnerable to Black men, they were given
the power to offer evidence of the Black male’s barbarism. Historically, white
women deliberately participated in the prosecution of Black men falsely accused
of rape even when the sexual encounter was initiated by them. Because of the
rape mythology, white women were able to exercise sexual power over, and
even rape, Black men freely. This reality, despite being factual, is not consid-
ered by Medina as part of the Southern order. Instead he imagines the question
as a series of credibility exchanges—be they deficit or excess—that allows white
men to believe either Mr. Robinson or Mayella Ewell. If, however, Black male-
ness is overdetermined by racial ideology, and proven by the scientism of the
day, to rape, then the facticity of Black maleness establishes a teleological view
of Tom Robinson very much opposed to variations of belief or disbelief. Mr.
Robinson’s fate is already predetermined in his relation to Mayella, because he,
as a Black man, is a rapist. All subsequent engagement is based in this racist
dilemma whereby Mr. Robinson is already determined by the sexual anxiety of
whites, and perceived by rationalizations created to bolster such anxieties. There
is no degree of credibility that can alter this predetermination for Harper Lee’s
characters. Mr. Robinson is doomed by his corporeality.
Medina reads Harper Lee’s narrative as a hypothetical case of how a white
public could react in such circumstances to lend credence to his idea of the
social imaginary. If, however, this fictional account of the actual practices that
made Black males sexually vulnerable to white bodies generally, and the white
female body in particular, mirrored historical circumstances where whites knew
of white women’s sexual aggression toward Black men—would such pretense
not be a stratagem, rather than a limitation of possibilities? If Mayella Ewell’s
actions were common practices of Southern (poor) white women, can Medina
be so sure that the white men in the novel do in fact diminish the credibility of
Mayella rather than establish it? Could this not be an example of the dissimula-
tion of gender under Jim Crow, whereby the white woman’s innocence is
338 Tommy J. Curry

violated by her sexual will and rape of Black men, but then re-established by
white men regardless of her behavior because the myth of her virtue is in fact
the foundation of white supremacy and demand her womanhood to be main-
tained? In other words, does Harper Lee not show us that white women can
commit all sort of violence(s), even rape, if they claim they are in fact victim-
ized in doing so? If this is the case, or likely possible, how can we assert, as
Medina does, that the social imaginary limits what the white jurors in Mr. Rob-
inson’s trial could actually believe? What such a possibility reveals is that rac-
ism utilized white womanhood in such a way that white publics often suspended
the reality of white women’s sexual aggression to maintain the illusion of their
purity at the expense of Black men’s lives.
The abstraction of testimony and imagination in both Fricker’s and Medina’s
accounts fail to emphasize the physical disability of Mr. Tom Robinson as an obsta-
cle to the accusations waged by Mayella Ewell and the court. Because Mr. Robinson
is a Black male there is a way in which the debates concerning credibility excess or
deficit operates primarily on the level of race and an imagined able-body-ness that
would allow Mr. Robinson to in fact harm Mayella Ewell. Because the phobias sur-
rounding Black men imply a peculiar savageness (almost super-humanism), the con-
ceptual analysis of testimony offered by Fricker and Medina obscures the physical
disadvantage and vulnerability Mr. Tom Robinson has to Mayella Ewell. This vul-
nerability is not only in the sense that this fictional disabled character could be over-
powered by an able-bodied female, but in the sense that the previous analyses of
Robinson’s disability did not render him to be thought of as being sexually vulnera-
ble to an able-bodied white woman. This presumption of gender vulnerability as
only residing within the female body serves to reify the idea that rape is only the car-
nal knowledge of the (white) female body and thereby imposes a peculiar burden on
Mr. Robinson to prove he did not fulfill his biological desire to rape even though he
was physically incapable of such an act. Because he—as male—is assumed to be
capable of rape, he is denied being considered by the reader (or the philosopher) as a
(Black male) victim of rape. As such, his disability is rendered irrelevant to his credi-
bility. Although Mr. Robinson’s disability obviously visible, it is disregarded
because of the assumed violent and rapist nature of Black males.
There is a seemingly intuitive relationship between racial oppression and
the character (trustworthiness, truthful, etc.) attributed to the members of racial
groups. Given the aforementioned bias which absolves Mayella from being a
rapist (as a white woman), we realize that such interpretations are not arrived at
through a philosophical analysis of the novel, or a historical survey of the time.
Such a conclusion is arrived at because of a socially ingrained determination
which holds it is only the Black male who can be deemed guilty of rape when
placed in sexual relation to a (white) woman. It is this hyper-masculine descrip-
tion, the category of the rapist as barbarous and able-bodied, that defines the
danger and violence assumed to be the nature of Black males and makes the rec-
ognition of Tom Robinson’s disability irrelevant to whether or not he was physi-
cally capable of committing rape against an able-bodied white woman.
 This Nigger’s Broken 339

Conclusion

In Harper Lee’s tale, disability operates to show that Tom Robinson’s

body was incapable of rape. This shows to the reader that the epistemic issues
taken up by Fricker and Medina are secondary to the factual basis of Tom Rob-
inson’s case. Because of his disability, Mr. Robinson could not have raped an
able-bodied white woman like Mayella Ewell who was attempting to escape
his grasp. Why then is this a question of how one knows innocence rather than
the ability one’s body has to commit the crime? Like the characters in the
story, the operating construction of race utilized by both Fricker and Medina
leaves unannounced the specific conceptualization of Robinson as being both
Black and male such that his disability is not recognized as formative to his
self—his very being. True to form, the hyper-sexuality and super-physicality
of Black males conceptually over determines how Black men are perceived in
their actual corporeal form. Though Medina and Fricker are suggesting that
this Black man, Tom Robinson, is in fact innocent, he is still thought to be
“able-bodied” such that he is a Black male that could rape even though in this
case he did not. In leaving Robinson’s maleness unanalyzed—presented as
obvious—there is the tendency to be unaware of the role this category plays in
the various epistemic deficits and imaginaries presented in Medina’s and
Fricker’s accounts. Black men inspire fear in the white mind. This specific
psychological reaction must be addressed in future considerations of disability
when dealing with raced and male bodies.
Mr. McDole was murdered because the white officers rationalized him as a
threat, a savage, and a danger to white life, despite his confinement to a wheel-
chair. He was denied vulnerability, he was denied victimhood, he was denied
consideration as a human being in need of help. To correct such philosophical
conceptualizations, there must be a focus on the actual effects disability has on
Black men and boys. If Black males are to be over determined by the fear-
inspired caricatures of this society, then there must be philosophical interven-
tions that convey the difference between the delusions of the white mind and the
lived reality—the physical existence—Black men and boys endure. Understand-
ing the relationship between violence and the Black male body helps to clarify
exactly what is denied to the disabled Black male. Is he more vulnerable to the
construction imposed on Black males because he cannot flee the advances of
white women, or less because he is seen as incapable of the evils committed by
able-bodied Black men?112
These questions, philosophically explored in this article, should serve as the
interpretive schema in empirical studies. The disabled Black male population
would benefit from policies and community interventions that recognize the spe-
cific racist and sexual stereotypes imposed on the Black male body, as well as
the implicit biases that are not mediated by physical and mental disability in this
population. Specifically, future research must address the consequences racist
misandry and gendered racism have on Black men disabled by gun violence and
340 Tommy J. Curry

crime related injuries.113 The disproportionate effect of homicide, police brutal-

ity, and gun violence on Black men and boys and other racialized and economi-
cally disadvantaged classes of males indicate that violently acquired spinal cord
injuries and near death related attacks are areas that require both philosophical
conceptualization and social scientific exploration.114

I particularly would like to thank Daniella Santoro for conversing with me

about the implications of my work in this area on academia.edu.

Notes
1
Ciara McCarthy, “Delaware Officials Investigating Fatal Police Shooting of Man in Wheelchair,”
TheGuardian.com, September 24, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/24/dela-
ware-fatal-shooting-jeremy-mcdole
2
Angelo Young, “Jeremy McDole Shooting: Did Disabled Black Man in a Wheelchair Have a Gun
or Not? Police Expected to Reveal More Monday,” IBTimes.com, September 26, 2015, http://
www.ibtimes.com/jeremy-mcdole-shooting-did-disabled-black-man-wheelchair-have-gun-or-
not-police-2115529
3
Phil Smith, “Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 24,
no. 2 (2004), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/491/668
4
Chris Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” in The Disability Studies
Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 275–83, 277.
5
Ibid., 282.
6
Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Expe-
rience, What It Is Like to Be Black,” in National Identity and Sociopolitical Change: Latin
America Between Marginizalization and Integration, edited by Mercedes Duran-Cogan and
Antonio Gomez-Moriana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 30–66.
7
Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body
Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 142.
8
Ibid., 142.
9
Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The
Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17–33, 18.
10
Oyèronke Oyewumı, “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects,” in The
Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–20, 1.
11
Ibid., 2. Oyèronke Oyew
umı, “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects,”2.
12
Pamela Block, Fabricio Balcazar, and Christopher Keys, “Pathology to Power: Rethinking Race,
Poverty and Disability,” Journal of Disability Policy Studies 12, no. 1 (2001): 18–39, 23.
13
Ibid., 24.
14
Ibid.
15
Erevelles, Disability and Difference, 141. Erevelles claims that her perspective “engages gender
and disability and their intersection with race, class, and sexuality within the material context of
the post/neocolonial state” (141), but her attention to the specific dynamics of Black male vul-
nerability and invisibility is obscured by her analysis of gender, which appears to be synony-
mous to the intersectional category of woman (99–103), despite the seriousness by which she
criticizes intersectionality for not engaging disability fully (104).
16
Ibid., 4.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
 This Nigger’s Broken 341

19
This is a well-established claim in the intersectionality literature concerning Black males. See
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; Frank Rudy Cooper,
“Against Bipolar Black Masculinity: Intersectionality, Assimilation, Identity Performance, and
Hierarchy,” University of California Davis Law Review 39 (2005): 853–904. For responses to
intersectionality theories of Black males, see Angela Harris, “Gender, Violence, Race, and Crim-
inal Justice,” Stanford Law Review 52 (2000): 777–807; Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The
Black Male’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: The Black Scholar Press, 1982); Darren
Hutchinson, “Identity Crisis: Intersectionality, Multidimensionality, and the Development of an
Adequate Theory of Subordination,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 6, no. 2 (2001): 285–
318; and Althea Mutua, “Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to
Feminism,” Nevada Law Review 13 (2013): 341–67.
20
Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S.
Slave Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014; Thomas Foster, “The Sexual
Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3
(2011): 445–64.
21
For a discussion of the sexual negation of Black maleness, see Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not:
Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2017).
22
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 110.
23
Sylvia Wynter, “Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the Demonic Ground of
Caliban’s Woman,” in Out of Kumbla: Carribean Women and Literature, edited by Carolyn
Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1994), 355–72, 358.
24
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 151.
25
Ibid., 151.
26
Ibid., 109.
27
Ibid., 113.
28
Ibid., 113–14.
29
Ibid., 154.
30
Charles Odier, Anxiety and Magic Thinking (New York: International Universities Press, 1956),
46.
31
Ibid., 46–47.
32
Phillip Attiba Goff, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Melissa J. Williams, and Matthew Christian Jackson,
“Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Con-
sequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 2 (2008): 292–306.
33
Kenneth Lawson, “Police Shootings of Black Men and Implicit Racial Bias: Can’t We All Just Get
Along,” University of Hawaii Law Review 37 (2015): 339–78.
34
Darren Wilson, “Transcript of Grand Jury Volume V,” September 16, 2014, 212. https://www.doc-
umentcloud.org/documents/1370494-grand-jury-volume-5.html (accessed July 20th, 2016).
35
Ibid., 228.
36
Tommy J. Curry, “Michael Brown and the Need for a Genre Study of Black Male Death and
Dying,” Theory and Event: Special Issue on Michael Brown and Ferguson 17, no. 3 (2014): 1.
37
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1960), 132.
38
Ibid., 163.
39
Ibid.
40
Pamela Barnett, Dangerous Desire: Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties (New
York: Routledge, 2004), xxvi.
41
Ibid., xxvi.
42
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 166.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
342 Tommy J. Curry

47
Ibid., 170.
48
Ibid., 171.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 176.
51
Ibid., 176.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid., 181.
54
Ibid., 182.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid., 188.
60
Ibid., 189.
61
Ibid., 190.
62
Ibid., 190.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
65
Barnett, Dangerous Desire, xxviii.
66
Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 157.
67
Ibid, 156.
68
Ibid.
69
E. Franklin Frazier, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” The Forum (1927): 856–861, 857.
70
Ibid., 857.
71
Ibid., 861.
72
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 291.
73
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks
in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1989), 10.
74
Ibid., 15.
75
Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Humanizing the Beast: King Kong and the Representation of Black Male
Sexuality,” in Classic Hollywood, Classic whiteness, edited by Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 159–77.
76
Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2004), 118.
77
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 25.
78
Ibid., 25.
79
Ibid., 27.
80
Ibid., 28.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid., 28.
85
Jose Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice,
and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67.
86
Ibid., 65–6.
87
Ibid., 66.
88
Ibid., 67.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 67–68.
92
Ibid., 68.
 This Nigger’s Broken 343

93
Ibid., 68.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid., 71.
97
Ibid., 68.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid., 71.
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.
103
Shelley Tremain, “Knowing Disability, Differently,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic
Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, Jose Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., 175–83, 179.
104
Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 68.
105
Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
106
Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” 450.
107
Ibid., 461.
108
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th Century South (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 202.
109
Ibid.
110
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in Amer-
ica (New York: Perennial Publishers, 1984), 29.
111
Crystal M. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 155.
112
Daniel Engber, “The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield,” NYTimes.com, October 20, 2015, http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html
113
Mutua, “Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to Feminism.”
114
See R. Noam Ostrander, “Meditations on a Bullet: Violently Injured Young Men Discuss Mascu-
linity, Disability, and Blame,” Child Adolescent Social Work Journal 25 (2008): 71–84.

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