Everyone's favorite houseguest who never left, Leon Black (played by award-winning comedian JB Smoove on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm) drops his wisdom and good-bad advice for the masses. Learn the secrets Larry David has gleaned from the Falstaff of television."--Amazon.

In 2021, the men’s English national football team reached their first final at a major international tournament since winning the World Cup in 1966. This success followed their previous achievement of reaching the semi-finals (knocked-out by Croatia) at the 2018 World Cup. True to form, the defeats proved unfalteringly English; with the 2021 final echoing previous tournament defeats, as England lost to Italy on penalties. However, what resonated with the predictability of an English defeat, was the accompanying chant, ‘it’s coming (...) home’. A ubiquitous presence throughout the course of both tournaments—while chanted at England football matches, it was also repeated across social media, the press and commercial advertising—the chant originates from the 1996 single, Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), performed by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds. In what follows critical attention will be given to examining how the song offers what will be argued is a melancholic outlook. By re-approaching examples of English nostalgia and hubris, this chapter will expose how illustrations of English melancholy offer the potential for promoting collective forms of expression, which, when contextualized alongside England’s lack of footballing success (for the men’s team, at least), can be offset against a melancholic mediation that is cognizant of the centrality of loss—both for the subject and our collective sporting endeavours. (shrink)

Why is it that we watch _Mad Men_ and think it represents a period? Flashes of patterned wallpaper, whiskey neat, babies born that are never mentioned, contact lining for kitchen drawers, Ayn Rand, polaroids, skinny ties, Hilton hotels, Walter Cronkite, and a time when Don Draper can ask ‘What do women want?’ and dry old Roger Sterling can reply ‘Who Cares?’ This essay explores the embrace of period detail in _Mad Men_ finding it to be both loving and fetishistic, and (...) belonging, like all period film, to the politics of the present. (shrink)

Because it is too important to be left to generals war is important enough to be studied by philosophy. The use of themselves as a force has no history and animals fight and have a history but do not wage war and make history. War takes life and creates a way of life. Don Quixote wishes to see in hell the inventor of “the dreadful fury of those devilish instruments of artillery … which is the cause that very often a (...) cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman.” Gunpowder, according to Hegel, is the work of thought and, like the printing press, promotes thought. Humanity required gunpowder and it was invented. The principle of chivalry, honor, is a particularity of feeling, the exact opposite of the universal of thought, and men cannot realize their common humanity where weapons are “arms,” physical forces. (shrink)

Here lyes that mighty Man of SenseWho, full of years, departed hence,To teach the other world Intelligence,This was the prodigious Man,who vanquish’ d Pope and Puritan,By the Magic of Leviathan.Had he not Controversy wanted,His deeper Thoughts had not been scanted;Therefore good Spirits him transplant:Wise as he was, he could not tellWhether he went to Heaven or Hell.Beyond the Tenth Sphere, if there be a wide place,He'll prove by his Art there's no infinite space:And all good Angels may thank him, for (...) thatHe has prov’ d they are something, tho men know not what.Hobbes's Epitaph. (shrink)

This review considers Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Providing a detailed account of the work and lives of the Frankfurt School, Jeffries is commended for his ability to present an illustrative biography of the school’s members and associates as well as the variety of topics that their work engaged with. However, while Jefferies manages to merge biography and academic theory in a readable and at times detailed and engaging narrative, such work is undermined by (...) a tendency to focus on the salacious gossip of a group of men whose real-life complications tend to overcome the significance of their arguments. Nevertheless, in view of the Frankfurt School’s work, it is suggested that the book’s paradoxes can serve as an important opening to contemporary topics and, more importantly, to theorizing these contradictions in light of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

In many regions around the world, those at highest risk for acquiring HIV are young adults and adolescents. Young men who have sex with men in the USA are the group at greatest risk for HIV acquisition, particularly if they are part of a racial or ethnic minority group.1 Adolescent girls and young women have the highest incidence rates of any demographic subgroup in sub-Saharan Africa.2 To reverse the global AIDS pandemic’s toll on these high-risk groups, it is important to (...) deploy the most effective HIV prevention tools to young MSM in the USA, to adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa, and to any other adolescents and young adults at high risk for HIV as products are proven to be safe and efficacious. Although prevention interventions with proven efficacy, such as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis, are available,3–8 they have not been sufficient to stem the tide and an expanded prevention toolkit is urgently needed to serve these populations. The field of HIV prevention continues to identify promising leads in the development of new biomedical prevention products, either delivering antiviral drug topically or systemically. The dapivirine ring has been shown to provide modest protection and is currently being tested in open label studies while injectable cabotegravir is being tested in a large efficacy trial for preventing HIV acquisition. Advances in the field of HIV prevention mean that scientists and regulators must plan for how they will bring prevention tools to populations at high risk for HIV as they conduct efficacy and effectiveness trials. For instance, safety data from younger age groups can also be used in combination with efficacy data from adult studies, where appropriate, as bridging studies to expand labelling to younger ages. If these …. (shrink)

Black Men from Behind the Veil bears witness to anti-Black male violence and does so from the perspective of Black male scholars who disclose their fears and what it means to suffer as Black men, courageously marking the deep material, institutional, and epistemic structures that amplify that fear and suffering.

The Black community has a long, well-documented history of being disproportionately harassed by law enforcement. While psychological research has studied this phenomenon, more in-depth research on Black men’s lived-experience of police harassment is needed. This qualitative study used descriptive phenomenology to investigate Black men’s experience of being harassed by law enforcement officers. An analysis of non-structured interviews with a sample of four participants revealed several essential aspects of this experience, including: anxiety in response to the initial awareness (...) of law enforcement’s presence, fear and confusion in response to abrupt escalation of aggression and hostility by officers, a sense of humiliation in response to degrading police tactics, anger over inability to pursue redress through the justice system, ongoing negative emotion, and a sense of having been psychologically harmed by the harassment. The implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Abstract The leadership of the black community is concerned with welfare, with equality, with unemployment, with discrimination, with racism, with the pay gap, and with dozens of other such traditional issues. Oh, yes, they are also apprehensive about the use of addictive drugs. But, as we speak, young male members of this community are being incarcerated at frightful rates, and, even worse, are killing each other to boot. One would think that this latter issue would occupy the interest of (...) black leaders front and center. After all, there are few worse problems than being jailed or killed. The present paper is dedicated to making the case that the black leadership has its priorities all wrong; that if they were to exercise true leadership, they would see the jailing and murder of young black men as perhaps the greatest threat to their community; and, if so, they would fervently support the legalization of all drugs. (shrink)

Evidence‐based interventions have been developed and used to prevent HIV infections among black men who have sex with men (MSM) in Canada and the United States; however, the degree to which interventions address racism and other interlocking oppressions that influence HIV vulnerability is not well known. We utilize integrative antiracism to guide a review of HIV prevention intervention studies with black MSM and to determine how racism and religious oppression are addressed in the current intervention evidence base. We (...) searched CINAHL, PsychInfo, MEDLINE and the CDC compendium of evidence‐based HIV prevention interventions and identified seventeen interventions. Three interventions targeted black MSM, yet only one intervention addressed racism, religious oppression, cultural assets and religious assets. Most interventions' samples included low numbers of black MSM. More research is needed on interventions that address racism and religious oppression on HIV vulnerability among black MSM. Future research should focus on explicating mechanisms by which multiple oppressions impact HIV vulnerability. We recommend the development and integration of social justice tools for nursing practice that aid in addressing the impacts of racism and other oppressions on HIV vulnerability of black MSM. (shrink)

Adopting a descriptive phenomenological approach, this study explores the experiences of discrimination of white women in committed interracial relationships with black men within the South African context. Three white females in committed interracial relationships with black males were recruited and interviewed. Open-ended interviews were conducted in order to elicit rich and in-depth first-person descriptions of the participants’ lived experiences of discrimination as a result of being in committed interracial relationships. The data analysis entailed a descriptive phenomenological content analysis (...) and description. The results of this study suggest that white women in committed interracial relationships with black men experience discrimination in various contexts, where discrimination manifests as either a negative or a positive encounter; in addition, discrimination evokes various emotional responses and is coped with in either maladaptive or adaptive ways. Finally, the experience of discrimination, although personal, necessarily impacts on the interracial relationship. The nature and impact of discrimination experienced by white women in committed interracial relationships with black men is thus multi-layered and both an intra-personal and an inter-personal phenomenon. (shrink)

The concepts of habitus and capital are crucial in the research tradition of social and cultural reproduction. This article applies both terms to an analysis of aspects of the life histories of low-income African American men. In exploring how their past experiences relate to their present-day statuses as nonmobile individuals, this article also revisits and redefines the utility of habitus and capital as conceptual devices for the study of social inequality. It expands the empirical terrain covered by the concept of (...) capital to include that which allows low-income individuals to manage their existence in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities while also hindering their mobility in the broader social world. One implication of this approach is an improved cultural analysis of low-income individuals. The improvement lies in that their behavior can be better understood as reflections of their readings of social reality, which are based upon the material and ideational resources that they have accumulated throughout their lives, and not simply as manifestations of flawed value-systems or normative orientations. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures—the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is “duly punished”—by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French (...) cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained “unrepresentable” in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. (shrink)

The decision to divorce marks a turning point for every individual involved. It can be viewed as more than just a legal process. From a psychological perspective, it does not matter who initiated the divorce, since it always comes with emotional ramifications for all those involved. Statistically, there is a high rate of divorce in South Africa and there have been significant shifts in trends over time. While black South African men’s experience of divorce has been relatively neglected in (...) the research on divorce, it is important for understanding contemporary social arrangements and processes, and, in particular, for broadening the understanding of black South African men’s lives. How black South African men describe their experience and respond to marital dissolution may point to their positions in the gender-structured community as well as illuminate how they interpret the nature of social practice, marriage, divorce and their position in society. The aim of the research reported on in this paper was to explore black South African men’s experience of divorce. The theoretical framework underpinning this qualitative study was broadly that of Symbolic Interactionism, with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis employed as both the research design and data analytic theory and process. The eight participants were volunteers who were recruited purposively. In keeping with IPA guidelines, data-collection proceeded by means of biographical questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The emerging themes were grouped into three superordinate themes, namely, perceptions of divorce, social support, and experiencing of pain. Each superordinate theme had corresponding subordinate themes and experiential claims. Weed’s recommendations for the interpretative synthesis of interview data were applied. (shrink)

Gender ideologies are embedded in intersecting race, class, and gender systems. Yet Black masculinity is often defined one-dimensionally, without attention to class variation in gender enactment. Particularly, with regard to heterosexual partnering, representations of Black masculinity most often involve men enacting compensatory displays to account for having too little masculine capital to meet the dominant culture’s protector–provider prerequisites for accomplishing marital masculinity. Drawing from interviews with 42 never-married Black professional men, I explore their ideas about how masculinity (...) ought to be done within the marital relationship—a critical site for the reproduction of gender inequality. Findings reveal that these men construct “Black professional hybrid masculinity” around a simultaneously racialized and classed compensatory strategy of masculine protection and equitable spousal sharing, resisting simple classification as either hegemonic or counterhegemonic. Rather, it is a distinctly hybrid masculine strategy. These men cherry-pick hegemonic gender norms to reconstruct gender identities that reaffirm their sense of manhood and idealize their future wives as symbols of hybrid femininity—work-devoted women who are also femininely in need of masculine protection. This research offers an intersectional extension of hybrid masculinity and illustrates the need for heterogeneous and context-varied theories of how Black men do gender. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are important differences between playing and non-playing roles in sport. The relevance of sex differences poses genuine philosophical and ethical difficulties for feminism in the context of playing sport. In the case of non-playing roles in general, and officiating in particular, we argue that reference to essential differences between men and women is irrelevant. Officiating elite men?s football is not a role for which ?essential? (psychological and biological) differences are causally implicated neither in (...) competence nor excellence. Reference to such purported differences to justify the exclusion of women from roles such as officiating is unfounded and sexist. (shrink)

This article focuses on the most important woman in Garveyism: Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey's second wife. Amy Jacques Garvey's true value in the Garvey movement has rarely been acknowledged; most authors and scholars have misleadingly depicted her as Marcus's “helpmate.” This article proposes that Amy Jacques Garvey was a key architect of Garveyism and a lifelong advocate of social justice in her own right. The author also examines the relationship among race, class, and gender as it pertains to Amy (...) Jacques Garvey's life and social thought. (shrink)

In this article, I use in-depth interviews with Black college students at two predominantly white universities to investigate the coconstruction of race, gender, and sexuality, and to examine intersectional identities as a dynamic process rather than bounded identity. I focus on Black college men’s talk about interracial relationships. Existing research documents Black women’s angry reactions to interracial relationships, but for Black men, interracial relationships present both problems and opportunities. I examine how Black men use two (...) distinct forms of interracial talk— “player” talk and “intimacy” talk—to negotiate racialized gendered stereotypes of Black men’s heterosexuality. By moving between forms of talk, Black men negotiate the identity tensions they face as Black upwardly mobile men. Player talk and intimacy talk both respond to and use racialized stereotypes, reworking the relationship between gender, race, and sexuality. In this case, disrupted racial boundaries uphold gender inequalities between men and women. (shrink)

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the (...) different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA. (shrink)

The youth in South Africa are subject to unemployment and the pressure to fit into society. The unemployment rate in South Africa is high; therefore, some find themselves desperate for employment and often find themselves hoping and praying for a miracle; hence, the number of churches in South Africa is increasing. People go to church to be prayed for by ministers in a hope to better their lives and that of their families. Some of these young South Africans became victims (...) of sexual harassment, rape and gender-based violence (GBV) at the hands of their pastors. The aim of this article was to challenge the church in identifying ways to break the cycle of perpetrators among pastors and help find the role pastoral counsellors can play regarding both victims and offenders to prevent history from repeating itself. Domestic violence and abuse in South Africa have been investigated by various disciplines. One of the most difficult realities for the church is the existence of clergy who abuse their female congregants. The article will create an awareness of violence against black women at the temple of black churches which is vindicated by Christian faith as miracle and healing. The violence against black women at the temple of the churches is patriarchal violence as male clergy sacrifice them in the name of faith using the bible. Some scholars of Black theology of liberation (BTL) argue that Elmina Castle had a chapel where women trading took place. Elmina Castle had a dungeon that kept black women who were waiting to be sold to a trade master. This article also exposed patriarchal violence that has been engraved on black women using the Bible by male clergy and connected Elmina Castle to Bishops Israel Makamu and Stephen Bafana Zondo to see the position of black women in these temples. Black theology of liberation was used to expose oppression of black women, by black men, in black churches.Contribution: This article aimed to challenge pastoral care givers to remain ethical during pastoral care and counselling to those in need, especially young women. This study was a literature review study. (shrink)

Intersectionality has utilized various feminist theories that continue subculture of violence thinking about Black men and boys. While intersectional feminists often claim that intersectionality leads to a clearer social analysis of power and hierarchies throughout society and within groups, the categories and claims of intersectionality fail to distinguish themselves from previously racist theories that sought to explain race, class, and gender, based on subcultural values. This article is the first to interrogate the theories used to construct the gendered categories (...) and the assumptions behind Black male positionality under intersectional analyses. Contrary to its promises for more liberated Black identities, intersectionality merely replicates the pseudo-science of racist criminology and presents decades old theories as cutting-edge gender analyses. In short, while intersectionality has allowed Black women to create nuanced experiences and epistemological accounts of Black womanhood, the very same theory has confined Black male experience to the perpetration of violence and defined Black manhood as lesser—merely the exemplification of white masculinity’s pathological excess. (shrink)

Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning humanity. It is also a philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of humanness, togetherness, and social politics of difference arise. Devi Dee Mucina is a Black Indigenous Ubuntu man. In Ubuntu Relational Love, he uses Ubuntu oratures as tools to address the impacts of Euro-colonialism while regenerating relational Ubuntu governance structures. Called "millet granaries" to reflect the nourishing and sustaining nature of Indigenous knowledges, and written as letters addressed to his (...) mother, father, and children, Mucina's oratures take up questions of geopolitics, social justice, and resistance. Working through personal and historical legacies of dispossession and oppression, he challenges the fragmentation of Indigenous families and cultures and decolonizes impositions of white supremacy and masculinity. Drawing on anti-racist, African feminist, and Ubuntu theories and critically influenced by Indigenous masculinities scholarship in Canada, Ubuntu Relational Love is a powerful and engaging book. (shrink)

Drawing upon Leigh Schmidt’s work on the “spiritual left,” this article presents a genealogy of the Black Spiritual Left featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard Thurman, and Black Lives Matter activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Black Spiritual Leftists are defined as Black figures who separated from or were not part of Black churches and yet took on a spiritual orientation important to their progressive activism. Their faith is Spiritual, but not (...) necessarily religious. In its most recent manifestation, the Black Spiritual Left argues—in opposition to some Black Church pastors—that defense of Black lives requires respect for marginalized Black women, LGBTQ, and criminalized Black men and boys. (shrink)

Drawing upon Leigh Schmidt’s work on the “spiritual left,” this article presents a genealogy of the Black Spiritual Left featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard Thurman, and Black Lives Matter activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Black Spiritual Leftists are defined as Black figures who separated from or were not part of Black churches and yet took on a spiritual orientation important to their progressive activism. Their faith is Spiritual, but not (...) necessarily religious. In its most recent manifestation, the Black Spiritual Left argues—in opposition to some Black Church pastors—that defense of Black lives requires respect for marginalized Black women, LGBTQ, and criminalized Black men and boys. (shrink)

Black women struggle to make the violence they experience visible for at least four reasons: the violence occurs in private, not in public; it is associated with sex, sexuality and intimacy; the violence is not amplified within the public and counterpublic spheres; and, finally and importantly, activists have not been as successful in constructing resonate narratives regarding the violence. Contemporary violence against black men, for example, is often understood through the lens of lynching, a phenomenon that earlier activists (...) were able to link to the biblical crucifixion. The activists’ work ensured that lynching holds an important place in the story of black peoplehood; it helped to make blacks as a political people and has been crucial to black understandings of who we are and why we are here. Social visibility requires that black women tell stories that not only build social movements; they must also tell stories that help to build people. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the representations of Black women in contrast to Black men found within Frantz Fanon’s philosophical work Black Skin, White Masks. I propose that while Fanon’s racial dialectical work is very significant, he often lacks acknowledgment of the multidimensionality of the Black woman’s lived experience specifically. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, I argue that Fanon does not recognize the different layers of oppression operating in Black (...) women’s lives to the degree that he fails to include them within his framework of both liberation and resistance from racial oppression. (shrink)

In Black Skin, white masks, Franz Fanon uses a psychoanalytic framework to theorize the inferiority-dependency complex of Black men in response to the colonial racism of white men. Applying his framework in reverse, this theoretical article psychoanalyzes the white psyche and emotionality with respect to the racialization process of whites and their racial attachment to Blackness. Positing that such a process is interconnected with narcissism, humanistic emptiness, and psychosis, this article presents how racial attachment becomes racial fetish. Such (...) a fetish reifies whiteness by accumulating fictive kinships with friends of color; hence, the common parlance of ‘But I have a Black friend!’ The article, then, overlays this theoretical interpretation onto the subject of teacher education in the US, specifically urban teacher education programs that are predominantly comprised of white middle-class females who claim a desire to ‘save’ urban students of color. Ending with the dangers and hopes of a more humanistic friendship, this article offers emotional ways one can self-actualize the racialization process. (shrink)