Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination

About the Book

Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination calls for a complete reassessment and overhaul of ethical, political, and religious thinking with respect to anti-Blackness and Black masculinity in the United States. In light of the prison industrial complex and a decade of homicide (2012-2022) of Black men and Black boys which spawned the Movement for Black Lives, Ronald B. Neal calls attention to a crisis of imagination on the part of elite social activists and intellectuals. Neal questions more than four decades of academic theory concerned with justice which has and continues to inform the most popular expressions of Black American activism. Readers are asked to grapple with the dilemmas which plague Black men and Black boys as a starting point for a reinvigorated imagination including new theories of justice and new paradigms of action. Neal contends that we can do better in those efforts that seek to engage and overcome anti-Blackness in the United States.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter One: The Death of a Nation: Black Masculinity and the Failures of Black Leadership
Chapter Two: We Don’t Need Another Savior: Intellectuals, Activists, and the Myth of the Black Messiah
Chapter Three: The Thrill Is Gone: The Obama Era and the Obsolescence of Black American Orthodoxy
Chapter Four: The Demonic Imagination: Black Masculinity and the Abominations of Religion and Theology in the United States
Chapter Five: Who’s Afraid of Black Men?: Black Women and White Saviors
Chapter Six: Legal Misandry: The Prosecutor Who Is Afraid of Black Men
Chapter Seven: Detox: Purging the Demonic
Chapter Eight: The Saga Continues: Cruel and Unusual Punishment, State Based Fatherhood, and the Rage for Order in the United States
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author

About the Author :
Ronald B. Neal is associate professor of religion in the Department for the Study of Religions at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC.

Review :
Working in a tradition of black male studies associated with the philosopher of race, Tommy Curry, Ronald Neal boldly courts controversy with a blistering critique of antiblackness as expressed in a convergence between ruling class whites and some black feminists in their dehumanizing assessments of black males, masculinity, and manhood. Neal describes this convergence as a "demonic imaginary," and argues that contemporary critical theory, including intersectionality, is predicated on the abjection of the black male. Ronald B. Neal's Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination is a masterful analysis of the cultural, theological, and socio-ontological obstacles to Black males' humanity. Neal's thorough investigation of the demonic imagination, that abyss of negativity generating endless caricatures of Black men and boys, demonstrates how gender theory, feminism, and liberalism not only depend on but generate dehumanizing tropes of Black males. Neal's Beyond Death and Jail powerfully disrupts the mythologies projected onto theory through our sacred creeds of identity.