Last year I was exchanging messages with Tommy J. Curry, who had recently arrived in Scotland to begin a position at the University of Edinburgh. Curry was a philosophy professor at Texas A&M in 2017 when The American Conservative ran a hit-piece accusing him of “racist bilge” and claiming that Curry is the Black inverse of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (but even worse).
A storm of racism and defamation predictably followed. Curry became the latest Black scholar to be dehumanized in a public mobbing, a periodic ritual of white supremacy. The intensity of the vitriol was such that Curry, fearing for his family’s safety, left the United States. Leaving the country was also a professional decision. Now marked as “controversial,” a concept larded with racist undertones, he was no longer viable in the academic job market.
Continue reading “Dressing Down, Layering Up”