Tommy Curry, Whose Remarks on Race Made Him a Target, Is Leaving the U.S. for Scotland

Tommy J. Curry, a black philosophy professor who received death threats for comments he made about racial violence, says he is leaving American academe for a position in Scotland. Being attacked online by white supremacists “stains you in a certain way” in the U.S. job market, Curry said.

The professor, who teaches at Texas A&M University, told The Chronicle that he has accepted a position at the University of Edinburgh as a professor of Africana philosophy and black-male studies.

Nick Treanor, head of the philosophy department at Edinburgh, said that he and his colleagues are excited by Curry’s work, and that they didn’t discuss the controversy surrounding his comments, which caught fire online in 2017. “That doesn’t seem relevant to us,” Treanor said, “if we’re trying to assess who’s a good philosopher.”

Curry joined Texas A&M in 2009. In 2012, he appeared on a radio show, Redding News Review, to lecture about race, fear, and other topics he studies. In December of that year, Curry planned to talk about Django Unchained, a film that stars Jamie Foxx as a gunslinger who rescues his enslaved wife by killing her white slavers.

“When we have this conversation about violence or killing white people,” Curry said on the show, it has to be looked at in these kind of “historical terms.”

“And the fact that we’ve had no one address, like, how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is, for black people saying, ‘Look in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.’ I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at, week after week, is national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying,” Curry said.

The piece was posted on YouTube with the title “Dr. Tommy Curry on killing whites.” In 2017, Rod Dreher, a blogger for The American Conservative, found Curry’s words and called them “racist bilge” in a column titled, “When Is It OK to Kill Whites?”

A Reddit forum devoted to Donald Trump noticed Dreher’s article, as did the far-right Gateway Pundit and Infowars. The professor said he received dozens of hateful messages and death threats. As the attention grew, angry alumni put pressure on the university to respond. Some wanted Curry to be fired.

Michael K. Young, Texas A&M’s president, called Curry’s comments “disturbing” and contrary to the values of the university. Young later acknowledged, in another statement, that scholars often find their work misunderstood, and clarified that he is committed to academic freedom.

Curry began looking for jobs that fall, he said in a phone interview. He said he hadn’t expected Young or the A&M administration to buy into “the political spin of white supremacists.” But it became clear, Curry said, that while there’s “a language of diversity” that allowed the university to hire a black professor, “given the political inclinations of the administrators, they’re not going to protect the black professor.” Curry also said that while the university police extended him some protections, he didn’t think the threats were being monitored closely enough to make him feel safe.

Pamela R. Matthews, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said in a written statement that she had just found out about Curry’s departure and that she wishes him well in his future academic endeavors. A spokesman for the university did not respond to Curry’s assertions about the administration or university security.

That fall, Curry said, he went on three or four campus job interviews, but there was “still this kind of cloud” hanging over those interactions. People would ask questions about the controversy, Curry said, or they would make judgment calls about his research and say something like, “Surely you don’t think armed resistance is the way.”

In those interviews, “you just never know what the right answer is because you can see the reactions in the room where people are associating you with a kind of radicality,” Curry said. “It has nothing to do with the work. “

By January of 2018, Curry was considering leaving America entirely. What black scholars can study and speak about has become extremely narrow, especially under the Trump administration, he said. If you take an unpopular view, like questioning the effectiveness of protests, the professor said, you’re out of line with a lot of the liberal sentiment in the academy. There’s a rich tradition in studying black militant resistance and revolution, Curry said, but that’s not what administrators want you to study.

And it’s often minority professors who end up on professor watch lists, and targeted by extremists, he said. Given those conditions, “we have to start asking real questions about whether or not academic freedom even applies to minority professors in America anymore,” he said. “Because it seems like this is not really an intellectual endeavor anymore. This is about staying quiet enough so that you don’t get attacked and people know your name.”

Interviewing at Edinburgh felt like a relief to Curry. The department is interested in radical ideas, he said, and whether or not they hold water. “It was a kind of freedom to actually start thinking again.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.