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When Philosophy Enters the Criminal Court: Black Male Studies as Expert Testimony (guest post)
To what extent should theoretical approaches to understanding the world offered up by the humanities sensitive to empirical evidence? And how might the humanities be different if its scholars took the demands of evidence more seriously? The emergence of Black Male Studies provides one lens through which to look at these questions. The following guest post has two parts. The first is written by Timothy Golden, a philosopher at Whitman College and former attorney. The second is by Tommy J. Curry, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. “Black men are dehumanized by a humanities-based academic lethargy that theorizes them to their detriment,” writes Dr. Golden, who explains how the law has begun to take the insights of Black Male Studies seriously, while at the hands of some of his colleagues he is “dehumanized by the humanities.” It needn’t be that way. As Dr. Curry writes, “Philosophers have much to contribute… by engaging in the messiness of the real world”—the kind of messiness that may not fit with certain neater theoretical pictures of the world. Such contributions may be towards a better understanding of humans and our relations with each other, but also to “criminal justice cases and the decision-making processes of judges and juries alike,” as he shows with a recent example in which “he became the first ever black philosopher to have their testimony pass the Daubert Standard, the strict criteria US courts use to determine whether evidence presented is of a rigorous, peer-reviewed and verifiable quality.” When Philosophy Enters the Criminal Court: Black Male Studies as Expert Testimony by Timothy Golden & Tommy J. Curry Part 1: Expert Testimony & Expert Dehumanization by Timothy Golden Rarely, if ever, are academic philosophers sources of expert testimony in criminal trials. Tommy J. Curry has changed that. The founder of the philosophical subfield of Black Male Studies (BMS), Curry posits that Black men are dehumanized by a humanities-based academic lethargy that theorizes them to their detriment. Consider being dehumanized by the humanities! Such theorizations, Curry argues, occlude the vulnerability and victimization of Black men, insofar as humanities-based academic theories portray them as embodiments of “patriarchal” oppression both within the Black community and beyond. I’ve experienced that dehumanization first-hand, as I relate..
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