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Texas A&M University professors and students are sharing their support for Tommy Curry, an associate professor of philosophy there who has faced physical threats and race-based harassment for talking about violence against whites in a 2012 podcast interview that resurfaced last week. That’s when The American Conservative ran a piece called “When Is It OK to Kill Whites?” that quotes Curry, who is black, as saying, “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.”
Many critics have taken the quote to mean that Curry actively supports violence against white people, but his comments related to a larger discussion about the historical lens and the Second Amendment, sparked by the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained.
“We would like to emphasize two points in particular,” a number of Curry’s department colleagues wrote in an op-ed in the newspaper The Eagle Saturday. “The first is that nowhere in the interview does Curry incite violence. What he does do is discuss remarks made by the actor Jamie Foxx about [Foxx’s] role in the film [and] relate those remarks to the role that violence and armed struggle has played in the progress of black civil rights. Second, in pursuing this discussion Curry is not simply exercising his First Amendment rights as a private citizen, but also is doing the job for which he has been awarded tenure at Texas A&M.”
Curry’s “assigned role at Texas A&M is to teach and research in critical race theory, an area where he is an acknowledged expert,” the statement reads, calling out the university for its “anemic” support for Curry in the matter thus far. “He has been encouraged to disseminate his ideas both within the academic world and more broadly.”
Students also have created a petition, which approached 1,000 signatures Sunday evening, criticizing Michael K. Young, university president, for calling Curry’s comments “disturbing” in a mass email about the case and for not expressing explicit support for him -- though Young did affirm First Amendment rights for all on campus.
“Young’s language in this email not only allows for but encourages the campus community to assume that Curry, in the podcast in question, used his First Amendment rights to ‘espouse hateful views’ by advocating for ‘violence, hate and killing,’” reads the petition, quoting Young’s email. “We believe that this is not only a mischaracterization of Curry’s comments but serves to perpetuate a targeted campaign against his person and his work."
The professors in their op-ed also “urge the university to fulfill its obligations in the face of a vicious attack on the academic values that are fundamental to our faculty and to our students.”
A university spokesperson said Texas A&M had no immediate comment Sunday.
Curry has since publicly clarified that he was making a philosophical point and not advocating violence against whites in the podcast. “I said in the initial conversation five years ago, the hypocrisy of self-defense proponents is that every group has a right to self-defense except historically oppressed groups like black Americans. My comments are about this historical contradiction. Black Americans’ right to defend themselves against white violence has historically been framed as hateful, whereas white Americans’ right [to] self-defense, which is often understood as their need to protect themselves from blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, is thought to be constitutional and an exercise of freedom,” he told KBTX-TV.
A number of outside scholars have defended Curry, too. Daily Nous, a philosophy blog, said that it Texas A&M seemed to be “buying” the decontextualized framing of Curry’s comments, or perhaps doing “public relations damage control.” It “would have been much better for Young to stick up for Curry,” it said, “rather than say things which he should know will in all likelihood make things worse for [Curry].”
