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The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

4.28 · Rating details · 412 ratings · 46 reviews

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration ...more

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Hardcover, 380 pages

Published February 15th 2010 by Harvard University Press

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Oct 23, 2012 Andre rated it really liked it

I'm a big enthusiast for history books that inform the present by examining the past. This is such a book! I was grabbed right from the introduction, on page 1, when the question is asked, "How was the statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged?" Many ignore or are ill-informed about such a link. You hear today a lot of talk about "black-on-black" crime. Once you understand the history of linking blackness to criminality, and this book will cement that comprehension you ...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Chris rated it really liked it

I picked up Dr. Muhammad's book after reading his thought-provoking article in the New York Times, "Playing the Violence Card", earlier this month. In the wake of recent murders, such as those in Florida and Oklahoma, which seem to hinge on issues of race, Dr. Muhammad asked us to scrutinize the origins of America's common conflation of blackness with criminality. By examining the use and misuse of racialized statistics, and comparing the experiences of blacks, poor whites, and european ...more

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Oct 11, 2017 Siria rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, history, american-history, current-affairs, by-poc, politics

“Black-on-black crime” and “black criminality” are terms bandied about with depressing regularity in the modern U.S. media (particularly in the right wing media, though even outlets that brand themselves as progressive do this too). Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s perceptive book teases out the history of terms like these and the ideologies that underpin them.

Muhammad argues that they are the product of a racist assumption that African-Americans are inherently “criminal”, an assumption that was ...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Camille marked it as to-read

Shelves: potential-vpbc-reads

08/2012
I saw Muhammad on Moyers & Co. a couple of weeks ago and he sold me on his book, but he also caught my attention and respect in that he recognized the experiences of Native Americans as the civil/human rights case that has still to be fully faced in this country. I appreciated that he took time away from a discussion on black folks to remind people about that.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/encore-...

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Jul 10, 2014 Chris brown rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite-books

somehow, my original review of this book vanished.
Luckily I posed the same review to my blog.

"If you are interested in how the systematic racial structures became established in the East and West then this book is a must have. The historical documentation that i found in this book might have taken a life time of searching in the realm of obscurity to find on my own. This book is an instant classic and has earned its place along side the classics of African American Studies like the Mis-Education ...more

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Jan 29, 2015 David Lucander rated it it was amazing

Shelves: african-american-history, u-s-history-20th-century

Condemnation of blackness is a study of race and crime, but the author also has a handle on progressive era ideology, urban politics, and that old phrenology race science stuff (researching that must have gotten tiresome). No one can ever call this book under researched. In fact, the notes themselves are worth reading. Muhammad is a real historian's historian, and that might put some general readers off because his arguments are subtle, accurate, and comprehensive. This isn't the kind of stuff ...more

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Apr 25, 2015 Jo Stafford rated it it was amazing

This is an excellent study of how race and crime came to be linked during the period between Reconstruction and the 1930s. Muhammad shows how crime statistics, stripped of their socio-economic context, were used to bolster racist arguments about African American criminality and traces the development of theories about supposed racial inferiority. He demonstrates how the application of social science theories impacted on African American communities, usually to their detriment.

Muhammad's ...more

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Sep 24, 2017 Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

Fantastic history of the merging of blackness and criminality. He tells a nuanced story here of blacks and whites, progressives and racists, north and south--the ways in which all these groups reacted to and spun a tale of black criminality to justify further subjugation. essential book.

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Jan 02, 2018 Joseph Stieb rated it really liked it

Shelves: us-history-non-military

This is the kind of book that takes something that was fuzzy and sharpens it considerably. Although the title makes the book sound more expansive than it is, this book makes important contributions to our understanding of how blackness and crime became so closely associated in 20th century America. Now, you may be thinking: "Didn't racists always tie blackness to crime in all of US history?" Answer: yes, but KGM shows that the period from 1890 (the US census that white race/crime experts saw as This is the kind of book that takes something that was fuzzy and sharpens it considerably. Although the title makes the book sound more expansive than it is, this book makes important contributions to our understanding of how blackness and crime became so closely associated in 20th century America. Now, you may be thinking: "Didn't racists always tie blackness to crime in all of US history?" Answer: yes, but KGM shows that the period from 1890 (the US census that white race/crime experts saw as a testing ground for how AA's had dealt with freedom since 1865) and the 1930's (when "foreign born white" was removed from US crimes statistics as a sign of the amalgamation of "ethnic whites into the white mainstream) was crucial for linking race and crime in several key ways. First, the advent of statistics based social science plus racial science lent scientific credibility to what had always been an ad hoc, cultural association of blackness and crime. Second, these same social scientists and politicians explained black crime as a product of blackness whereas they explained white ethnic crime as a product of class and social surroundings. Third, they argued that AA's high crime rates had proven that they had failed the test of freedom and largely could not be equal to whites. The solution they promoted was tougher policing and higher jail terms to discipline AA's (tough love: sounds familiar?). They blatantly ignored anti-black racism and argued that the stats showed how unfit for freedom and equality AA's were. Most of this discourse took place in northern cities and universities that were dealing with waves of AA migration from the south.

KGM also shows the rise of liberal and black anti-racist discourses of race and crime in the Progressive era. Most liberals acknowledged that black crimes statistics were high, but they attributed this to economic deprivation, racism, job and housing discrimination, and "cultural defects" in AA's that stemmed largely from slavery. Instead of writing race into crime, they wrote culture into crime, which can lead to a different but equally harmful type of cultural racism. Some liberals challenged the idea that blacks were more criminal by breaking down the statistics themselves. For example, some black sociologists showed huge disparities in police behavior, sentencing, and the pushing of vice and crime into black neighborhoods, where it was not policed as strictly. KGM marshals indisputable evidence that the stats inflated black criminality and did not tell the stories of how whites provoked blacks or harassed them for no reason, leading to the arrest of the victim. There's a lot to learn here about reading underneath the stats on race and crime.

Probably the most profound point of this book is that white Progressives responded to white ethnic criminality with compassion and social programs because they saw their crimes as a product of circumstance rather than innate defects. White immigrants were Americans in the making who just needed a little boost. In contrast, because they saw black crime as innate or at least stemming from deep cultural pathologies, white Progressives believed social programs would do nothing to help AA's reform and move up the socio-economic ladder. This cycle would repeat itself in the New Deal, showing that the creation of the white middle class and the denial of that growth to AA's was largely a deliberate process. I can't state enough that the racial inequality was an intentional development and that its redress will require intentional action.

It's hard to recommend this book to a non-academic audience, although U.S. historians of any specialization should check it out. For a more general reader, it's probably too dense and topically narrow to be enjoyable, especially if you don't already have a good sense of race in U.S. history and of the Progressive Era more specifically. There's a long chapter on race and crime in Philadelphia that it probably too detailed for the more general reader to enjoy. Let me add that compared to other books on racial discourses (like Stamped from the Beginning by Kendi), I liked that KGM avoided critical race theory type language and stuck to the sources. This is obviously an important book for the study of race through any lens, but as a historian I liked that KGM let the story speak for itself in political terms. It's also a stark reminder that statistics never interpret themselves, a lesson that cannot be learned enough. ...more

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Aug 17, 2014 Sugy rated it really liked it

Shelves: sociological, my-home-bookshelf

This thorough analysis of how the late 1800s and early 1900s helped to continue and enhance the idea of inferiority and criminality of black people in the US is just one great reference. The emotional toll this book takes it not simply because the toll bad science and rampant personal bias took on relations between people, but even more so because the situations described and the cherry picking of data still occur today. It would be wonderful to see this book bridged with a modern volume that ...more

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Feb 02, 2013 Susie rated it liked it

Shelves: for-school

A little hard to get through, but definitely well researched and very interesting subject material. A must read for anyone interested in the origins of black criminality.

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Sep 09, 2012 Sean O'Brien rated it it was amazing

An important alternate history of both the rise of racism post-Civil War and the antecedents of the civil rights movement. This history should be taught to our children in school.

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Mar 23, 2018 Vincent rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: african-american-studies, 19th-century-america, 20th-century-america

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America employs a historiographic lens to examine the discourse of social scientists with regard to the emergence of crime statistics and their unflattering association with black racialization. Such crime data was weaponized in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to confirm the already existing racist rhetoric of black inferiority and, more importantly, black criminality. For Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America employs a historiographic lens to examine the discourse of social scientists with regard to the emergence of crime statistics and their unflattering association with black racialization. Such crime data was weaponized in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to confirm the already existing racist rhetoric of black inferiority and, more importantly, black criminality. For Muhammad, “the idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America. In nearly every sphere of life it impacted how people defined fundamental differences between native whites, immigrants, and blacks.” In particular, it impacted “how people evaluated black people’s presence - the Negro Problem, as it had once been called - in the urban North.” Blacks were not only stigmatized as biologically, culturally, or by social circumstance, depending upon the era, more prone to criminality, but such views resulted in unequal treatment by every facet of society, including the racially liberal northern progressives. Programs of reform offered to white immigrants were denied to blacks, who were also the target of violent discrimination, making their situations more dire.

For a detailed look at Muhammad’s argument, click the spoiler section.

(view spoiler)[Muhammad organizes his argument chronologically, from the 1890s to the 1930s, and focuses especially on Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York in the later chapters. The first chapter details the years following the Reconstruction era, when race writers first began using census reports and emerging statistical methodology to create new social scientific theories about blacks, and “out of the new methods and data sources, black criminality would emerge, alongside disease and intelligence, as a fundamental measure of black inferiority.” Dubbed the Negro Problem, whites worried about what should be done with the millions of newly freed blacks moving to northern urban areas. Many thought that without the pressure of slavery blacks would revert to a naturally savage state, and that they “could not and should not be assimilated as truly free members of a white society.” When physical evidence of black inferiority came up short, social scientists instead looked to a “behaviorist paradigm, measuring inferiority not just by physical differences but also by the historical and contemporary behavior of ‘primitive’ races in civilized societies.” This sets the stage for chapter 2 and its main player, Frederick L. Hoffman, a German immigrant whose 1896 book Race Traits and the Tendencies of the American Negro convinced a generation to adopt an interpretation of crime data that linked it with black racial criminalization. Hoffman and many others discounted racism, believing that science and statistics objectively proved the inferiority of blacks, combining a white supremacist narrative with statistics while “trying to minimize the appearance of doing so.” Hoffman’s “major innovation was in presenting for the first time a statistical ‘study of the negro criminal’... ultimately, by framing black criminality as a key measure of black inferiority in the same way his peers and predecessors had done through anatomical measurements and mortality data, Hoffman wrote crime into race and centered it at the heart of the Negro Problem.” Some black scholars, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, tried to challenge Hoffman, but they were few in number and largely ignored, even by fellow scholars. Overall, social scientists embraced the statistical studies because they seemed to prove their already racist notions while separating them from the pro-slavery Confederate past. Unsurprisingly, such thinking created a double-standard with regard to crime among whites and blacks, where the prior was seen as a result of environmental pressures and the latter the product of inferior biology. In other words, “white criminality was society’s problem, but black criminality was black people’s problem.” Muhammad shows quite astutely that “the inseparable linking of the two social categories of race and crime were not inevitable; it was a conscious result of several writers’ attempts to expand definitions of blackness beyond physical traits, historical association with slavery, and nineteenth-century romanticization of blacks as a child race.”

The third chapter moves the reader into the twentieth-century. Here, progressive era racial liberals and northern progressives formed “a new line of inquiry… that linked black criminality not to hereditarian theories of race but to the absence of environmental interventions like those proliferating among whites in the urban north.” Northern liberals stressed two factors: rejection of “biological determinism” and the appeal for measures that would help blacks, such as education and greater economic opportunities. However, by replacing biological determinism with culture as the cause for black criminality, blacks were still stigmatized as being predisposed to crime. Now, however, they were viewed as an immature race that was far behind what contemporary America represented. For many, “culture was race even if the anthropological evidence showed otherwise.” Said another way, “it was the initial product of twentieth-century racial liberals’ first successful attempts to defend the humanity of blacks and their right to fair play in American society, and at the same time concede that blacks were still sufficiently inferior behaviorally or socially to warrant special attention, but not necessarily special help.” Despite their lip-service, reformers put into practice proper intervention for whites while neglecting blacks; “too often white reformers settled for indexing racial injustice rather than fighting it.” Black’s perceived shortcomings discluded them from reform measures, such as when black women were disqualified from laws protecting women from forced prostitution. To their credit, however, northern progressives at the very least acknowledged the presence and effects of northern racism.

The fourth chapter focuses on Philadelphia’s settlement houses, for, as Muhammad contends, the city “was one of the most important black-criminality research sites in the nation.” With regard to black citizens, the settlement houses, whose mission was to help the needy and improve the city, held a policy of malignant neglect. For them, black criminality was neither simply biological nor cultural, but a moral failing. Such thinking “contributed to a national forum that emphasized improving bad housing as much as it did eliminating black criminals… Their practices reflected the type of slippery thinking that shifted criminality from being a symptom of structural inequality to being considered the cause.” Unlike European immigrants, blacks were either “avoided” by settlement houses or seen as “too unworthy for reform.” As a point of comparison, “southerners used crime to justify disenfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation; northerners used it to justify municipal neglect, joblessness, and residential segregation.” Many northern whites supported industrial education for blacks in the South yet failed to assist blacks in need within their own cities. This was at least partly to keep blacks from moving north to look for opportunities.

The fifth chapter once again begins with Philadelphia, this time focusing on its process of fighting crime. In 1912 Mayor Rudolph J. Blankenburg commenced an attack on vice in the city, but only focused on white communities, leaving black neighborhoods to continue to suffer their hardships. Additionally, “in the midst of Mayor Blankenburg’s well-publicized anti-vice crusade, police reform and crime prevention among whites appeared to come at the expense of blacks’ safety from assaults by white civilians and police officers.” Forced to carry weapons to protect themselves from frequent attacks, blacks inevitably ran into fatal confrontations. These “incidents of racial violence contributed to the criminalization of African Americans.” The influx of southern black migrants increased racial tensions and conflict with black natives, and these newcomers were pointed to as the causes for the Chicago race riots of 1917 and 1918; “black race relations experts blamed migrant criminals for legitimizing white contempt.” However, Muhammad contends that “white resistance to the demand for better housing by the black middle class amid heightened expectations born from the war was the primary cause of the riots.”

The sixth chapter brings the reader into the 1920s and 1930s, by which time black neighborhoods had become vice districts, allowed by authorities who believed blacks were naturally degenerate. Ironically, however, crime in these areas was often run by whites, including corrupt politicians. At last, at least among progressive scholars, “structural inequality… became the primary basis for explaining black criminality.” Now reformers pointed to discriminatory police practices as the root of the problem, and by “directly linking police officers’ discriminatory attitudes and behavior to high crime rates among blacks” these racial progressives created “an entirely fresh approach.” In relation, researchers began to recognize the flaws in criminal statistics, like those Hoffman wielded to such wide effect, and deemed them unusable. Nevertheless, “to the nation’s top law enforcement officials, race tables continued to speak for themselves” and prompted little change. By the 1930s, “blackness… stood as the singular mark of a criminal.” (hide spoiler)]

Muhammad advances existing scholarship by shedding light on the influence of black criminality in the history of the northern criminal justice system. The works of previous historians have “turned almost exclusively on the experiences of native-born whites and European immigrants” with little discussion pertaining to “black experiences until the post-World War II era.” Additionally, “rather than following the lead of social historians of working-class immigrant and black communities who link ethnic culture to distinct patterns of criminal behavior,” Muhammad “explores the genealogy of distinct patterns of racial crime discourse.”

The Condemnation of Blackness lays bare the trail that lead to the concept of black criminality and offers kean insight into the forces and perspectives which linked blackness with a propensity to commit crime. Muhammad deftly gives voice to both sides of the racial divide and to those who attempted to bridge the gap. Reading about Hoffman, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much of his influence can still be heard today among those calling attention to current crime statistics and prison demographics, devoid of context, as proof that blacks, left to their own devices, naturally gravitate toward deviance. Even today it’s not uncommon for a white criminal to be seen as a victim of circumstance, but a black criminal as a fulfillment of his/her DNA. In the age of the Black Lives Matter movement and of black professional athletes taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police discrimination, there is a clear indication that the issues Muhammad pinpoints are still working their way beneath the skin of a racially divided America.
...more

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May 24, 2019 Geoffrey Gordon rated it really liked it

Shelves: racism

This book examines how social science -- and social statistics, in particular -- deepened ideological beliefs about black criminality at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the north. It discusses the work of social Darwinists in the late 19th century who used statistics about the disproportionate arrests of black people in northern cities to support the view that blacks are inherently violent and immoral, and statistics about black mortality to show that they were dying out because of This book examines how social science -- and social statistics, in particular -- deepened ideological beliefs about black criminality at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the north. It discusses the work of social Darwinists in the late 19th century who used statistics about the disproportionate arrests of black people in northern cities to support the view that blacks are inherently violent and immoral, and statistics about black mortality to show that they were dying out because of their lack of fitness for modern civilization. It then shows how these statistics came to be interpreted as evidence of environmental and cultural factors, rather than biological ones, that make blacks more violent, without recognizing that the crime statistics actually demonstrated biased patterns of policing rather than black criminality. Muhammad demonstrates how the standpoints of social scientists influence the ways that they interpret data, showing how black social scientists -- particularly ones from lower class backgrounds -- were more likely to interpret crime data as evidence of racially biased policing, whereas white social scientists and middle-class black social scientists were more likely to emphasize the criminality and inferiority of poor black migrants from the south to northern cities.

Contemporary social scientists might read this book as evidence of the progress that quantitative research methodology has made over the course of the last century, and not without reason. As a political scientist who has taken several courses in statistics and research methodology, I was struck by how these social scientists draw far-reaching conclusions about black inferiority from poorly designed studies with measures that lacked construct validity. But instead of smuggly thinking that social scientists are so much more enlightened today because of advances in statistical theory and research methodology, we should read this as a cautionary tale, for a couple of reasons. First, there is still a widespread perception that data speaks for itself, and that machine learning and other advanced quantitative methods have made theory obsolete. As this book demonstrates, our a priori ideas about how the world works affects how we interpret quantitative evidence. Secondly, social scientists are products of the very hierarchical social orders that they study. Our standpoint within the interlocking social hierarchies that characterize the world we live in affect how we interpret evidence. The lack of diversity in academic social science is really concerning because it means that we are liable to producing research that is marred by unconscious biases.
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Feb 13, 2017 Dallas Swindell rated it really liked it

The Condemnation of Blackness is a thorough, and often dense, exploration of the erroneous dangers of racial liberalism in the cities of the Northeastern United States from reconstruction on past the great migration. Khalil Gibran Muhammad teleologically documents and lays bare the interminable white supremacism that lead to the perpetuation of African Americans as second class citizens via crime, culture, and the Jim Crow valuation of innate worthlessness. Apologists and hesitant allies like The Condemnation of Blackness is a thorough, and often dense, exploration of the erroneous dangers of racial liberalism in the cities of the Northeastern United States from reconstruction on past the great migration. Khalil Gibran Muhammad teleologically documents and lays bare the interminable white supremacism that lead to the perpetuation of African Americans as second class citizens via crime, culture, and the Jim Crow valuation of innate worthlessness. Apologists and hesitant allies like Booker T Washington and Susan Wharton are contrasted with their true abolitionist contemporaries like W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B Wells. By placing each figure and organization (such as the NAACP or the NUL) into historical context KGM is able to elucidate the origin of their philosophies and the resulting effects of their spotlight within the greater sociocultural milieus of America’s rapidly urbanizing cities.

The Condemnation of Blackness is organized to move forward historically and show the ways in which black destitution and crime was reflexively turned back on the African American populations of the North East and Southern United States as a way of deflecting the root (institutionally racist) causes of those ills. Instead the biology, culture, and work ethic of these populations was systematically purported by white racial liberals and model black citizens alike to engender stasis and suffering all while new immigrant populations were being supported and integrated into cities across the country. The otherness of black skin was something which the latent and active white supremacism of American history and developing society in the 200 years since emancipation could not lose grasp of, as the result would be facing the true process of equality. KGM underscores this in all of his analysis, yet does so within the context of each chapter of struggle that he is documenting; rather than presenting his own scrutiny forthright and outside of the background of the cities, individuals, and organizations he is bringing to bear.

My main complaint with the book is that at times KGM's system of analysis is perfectly situated within the context of his research, while at other times, it's often hard to discern when he is filling in a blank in someone's quote, relaying their message as it was accepted at the time, or digging deeper into the effects of the individual, policy, or organization. If anything this has caused a bit of looping back and forth on my part to make sure all implications of his research and points are clear before reading on. The at times dense nature of his writing does however lends a thoroughness and sharp eye to a history of the US that I have often found glossed over in my own education so far. His detailed analysis has helped illuminate a very multifaceted and detailed understanding of the ways in which race was transmuted and a whole population of people were subverted from the American culture of freedom. Or as KGM himself says, his work is in documenting the "paradoxes of 'racial reform' vis-a-vis racial condemnation... reveal[ing] the degree to which appeals to whites [and the existing sociopolitical infrastructure of America] for racial reform depended on black leaders' willingness to traffic in the rhetorical currency of black inferiority."

Many, if not most, of those paradoxes are still playing out in present day American society. As KGM focuses in on the early 1900s in Philadelphia his depictions of white denizens, police forces, and government officials creates a strong parallel with current anti-black culture. Speaking of a routinely disenfranchised and victimized black population (I.e. unfair housing practices, reduced local services, racial profiling by police, and lack of representation in local government) he points out: “They were criminalized because of their willingness to fight back... black resistance this justified the initial assumption that blacks were a threat to white communities.” These same words could be describing cities across present day America, where struggles for equality still persist. KGM’s historical tracing and present day condemnation of accommodationist politics is still applicable today, where the same sociocultural and state-structured ills will place those most often exploited so long as their resistance and reality continues to be negated. ...more

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May 02, 2018 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, 2018

The book isn't as expansive as the title might indicate, and ends up taking a very narrow topic (the rise of social science, particularly sociology, in the late 19th century, and its effect on views of the intersection on criminality and race) and digging in far more deeply than was consistently interesting. I'm intrigued by Muhammad's claims, but I feel like I understood his basic point within the first chapter, and the recitation of the nuances of how one school of sociology differed from ...more

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Mar 12, 2017 Heather rated it liked it

Shelves: social-justice

Incredibly detailed and well-researched book about the use of racial crime statistics from the 1890s to 1940s. I wanted to read it because of the content, but it took a few months for me to get through. It's a fairly academic book that may not interest the average reader. If you're looking for an introduction to the history of race relations in the U.S., I would recommend a more concise book like White Rage by Carol Anderson. However, if you want to read the nuanced research that backs up ...more

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Jan 31, 2014 Frank rated it really liked it

An astoundingly well-researched and annotated study of the racialization of crime from the beginning of the Jim Crow era to the New Negro Renaissance. Not exactly a page-turner (I occasionally found myself lost in the weeds of Muhammad's examples and analyses), the book nevertheless offers a fine-grained historiography that details the racism of many American criminologists and social theorists, along with the work of people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Charles S. Johnson who tried ...more

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Sep 01, 2013 Kim Martin rated it really liked it

This book will change forever the way I think about crime, prisons, education, race relations, and our current sociological problems involving all of these things. While the book was pretty dense, and addressed historical racism with a narrower focus, on late nineteenth/early twentieth century urban crime, than I anticipated, the application is broad, and will cause me to look at current efforts to address drug laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, and sociological research differently.

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Dec 03, 2013 UChicagoLaw added it

Shelves: faculty-recommendations, 2013-faculty-recommendations

"A gripping account of the origins of statistical justifications for the harsh policing of African Americans. Readers interested in our current debates on racial profiling may find the latter revealingly illuminated by Muhammad’s genealogy of the early statistical foundations of claims about the intrinsic nature of black criminality." - Aziz Z. Huq

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Mar 21, 2018 Katie Fuller rated it it was amazing

An excellent book that looks at early sociological studies of race and criminality. The book shows how these ( mostly white) researchers were essentially writing racism into the science books and the unfathomable destruction of their analyses. On the other side of the arguments were the great W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells, who along with others, challenged these studies.

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Dec 10, 2012 Pascal rated it really liked it

Excellent chronicling of the way race and racism has been woven in social science data on crime. This is a very important book in understanding how notions of racial inferiority were tied to crime in order to justify racist abuse and neglect by municipal police departments throughout the northeast from the 1890s to the 1940s.

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Jan 15, 2014 Claudio Rivera rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book essentially details the origins of "Stop and Frisk" and the injustice of it all. A worthwhile read for anyone who has ever subscribed to the notion that since blacks are arrested more often, there is something inherently criminal about them.

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Jan 07, 2018 Lisa rated it liked it

Muhammad explores the development of antiblackness in crime from the late 1800s. I found his exploration of data collection and use most compelling.

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Jan 21, 2017 Laura Aranda rated it it was amazing

Excellent, historical analysis.

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Sep 05, 2012 Mark added it

A tough but essential read for understanding modern crime statistics and their relation to race.

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Aug 05, 2011 Daryl Grigsby marked it as to-read

too many books - too little time!!!!

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Apr 14, 2013 Mark Middleton rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american-culture-studies, history, cultural-studies, united-states

A well written, researched and documented book on its subject matter. Many of the issues raised still exist today, as well as the attitudes.

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Jul 16, 2012 Keith rated it really liked it

Fascinating argument but the level of detail and laser focus on the Progressive period made this moderate-length book a bit of a slog.

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Jul 01, 2013 Ayman Fadel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-us, racism

Check out my review at

https://storify.com/aymanfadel/review

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Khalil Gibran Muhammad

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Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system and one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the ...more

Books by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Bootstrapped: How Conservative Thought SIdetracked Social Justice

Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century

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Quotes from The Condemnation ...

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.” — 11 likes

“That racial categories were hardening at this moment put Boas’s statements directly at odds with an increasing public desire to believe in racial purity. White southerners were hysterical over the threat of “social equality” or what they took to mean the apocalyptic possibility of black men “ravishing” white women and passing on their “degenerate” traits to a “pure” white race” — 0 likes

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