Having grown up in a working-class family in Lake Charles, La., Dr. Tommy Curry is no stranger to intellectual adversity.
When he joined his high school debate team at the age of 12, he began reading works by Frantz Fanon and Derrick Bell. He recalls how his fellow debaters resisted his employment of critical race theory at local competitions.
Now, as a young tenured faculty member, he is one of the few scholars researching critical race theory at Texas A&M’s philosophy department. During his rise from assistant professor to full professor within six years, the lessons he learned as a young debater have remained relevant.
“I was drawn to debate because I loved the idea that you can speak quickly and that you can do research and that you would be judged on what you know instead of your skin color,” Curry says. “As a Black kid growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where everything’s about race, it was refreshing to think, even as naïve and idealistic as it may be, that there’s somebody who would value what I said because I made a good argument and not because of how I looked.”
That vision of philosophical discourse was tested for Curry in July when comments he made about the film Django Unchained were taken out of the context of a larger discussion about gun ownership by Black people and interpreted as a call for violence against White people. He received violent threats via email and social media. For Curry, this incident mirrored a problem that often occurs in academia, that is, the inclination toward identity politics, as opposed to rigorously addressing the issues.
Curry published his first book, titled, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, in July 2017. His work uses social and political philosophy to study Black masculinities. Unlike the norm in academic philosophy, Curry relies heavily on facts and historical context to substantiate his ideas, he says.
“For me, any time you look at a philosophical problem, you have to understand the history, or what happened beforehand, because that gives you complexities involved in the problem that you’re trying to study, as well as what’s going on with the problem right now,” he says. “Once you have that, then you can start thinking abstractly or doing philosophy.”
