Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

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

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

4.22 · Rating details · 816 ratings · 113 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 tr ...more

Get A Copy

Hardcover, First Edition (U.S.), 380 pages

Published February 15th 2010 by Harvard University Press

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Condemnation of Blackness, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about The Condemnation of Blackness

Lists with This Book

The Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

NPR Throughline Podcast Books

101 books — 3 voters

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes

New York Times Anti-Racist Reading List

21 books — 1 voter

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 4.22 ·

Rating details

· 816 ratings · 113 reviews

More filters

Sort order

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

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

flag 27 likes · Like · see review

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 immigran ...more

flag 15 likes · Like · see review

Oct 11, 2017 Siria rated it really liked it

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

“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 legiti ...more

flag 10 likes · Like · see review

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.

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

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

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

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-... ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

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

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

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 t ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Dec 20, 2020 Becky rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, i-want-this, 2020, social-justice, non-fiction, politicalish, reviewed, black-lives-matter

The more of these kinds of books I read, the more inadequate I feel I am to review them. This one feels particularly difficult, because most of my reactions to this book were inarticulate internal screams of rage and frustration that, if I were forced to articulate them, would be best be summed up as "The more shit changes, the more it stays the same" and "How are these exact ideas and arguments still a thing??".

This book covers a period of time from around 1890 to around 1930, and goes through The more of these kinds of books I read, the more inadequate I feel I am to review them. This one feels particularly difficult, because most of my reactions to this book were inarticulate internal screams of rage and frustration that, if I were forced to articulate them, would be best be summed up as "The more shit changes, the more it stays the same" and "How are these exact ideas and arguments still a thing??".

This book covers a period of time from around 1890 to around 1930, and goes through all of the ways that black people were demonized by white people - from how they are physiologically different (false), to how they are mentally, ethically, morally, and intellectually inferior (again, false), to how they, as a people, are to blame for every shortcoming or hardship they encounter because of these failings, and more (obviously fucking false).

This book basically outlines exactly how racist white people learned their way around the small inconvenience of not being able to subjugate, beat, rape, and kill black people they OWN and learned how to subjugate, beat, rape, and kill black people that were ostensibly "free".

This is the creation of the systemic, institutionalized, and structural racism we still have today. All of the racist attitudes toward black people, all of the racist opinions on criminality, all of the racist feelings about what black people need and deserve and what they don't, and more - all of those origins were outlined in this book.

This was not an enjoyable read for me. I cried more than a few times out of sheer frustration and anger at the injustice and fucking STAMINA of it all. The fact that now, well over 120 years later, these very ideas and concepts are not only still around, but are having something of a resurgence... it was not a good time.

Deep down, I knew all of this at some level. I knew, obviously, that racism has been around for a very long time, and that it obviously would have stemmed from post-Civil War American history. But what this book made absolutely, crystal fucking clear it was, was how strategically it was implemented. This was no accident. The creation of modern, systemic and structural racism was designed and purposeful. A few powerful white men used their positions of authority in their respective fields to solidify their racism and biased ideas of black inferiority and criminality in the minds of the public, and therefore in the laws and policies made to "protect" that public from the black people that were encroaching on all sides now that they were free to do so... And as "far" as we have come since, we are not even close to eradicating these things from our society.

I have barely touched on anything but the surface of this book in my review, but believe me when I say that this book is exceedingly well researched, and presented in a factual, direct way that is anything but sensationalized. It's broken up by topic, and works really well this way, as each topic builds on to the information from the last. But it does end up being a tiny bit dry and scholarly because of the way that it was presented. I completely understand the decision to step back and present the facts unemotionally, but it's a shame that it must be this way. Though of COURSE it is this way - this book outlines exactly why and how we got here.

This book should be required reading. ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Feb 05, 2021 Teri rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2021, non-fiction

"There are three kinds of lies, someone has said, 'white lies, black lies, and statistics.'" (p 48) Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America" looks at how data/statistics created the construct of the "negro problem" that established itself into American society by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler in 1884. Utilizing data, particularly from early census records and crime statistics, Shaler and others created a narrative that portrayed Af ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

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 comparis ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

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 in ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

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.

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Mar 04, 2020 Ali Gibbs added it

Good, important book. I knew what I was getting into when I chose this, but I still can’t give it a fair rating because it was so academic. I’m glad I read it, learned a lot, and recommend it to others!

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 17, 2020 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: social-justice

For anyone watching the news and asking themselves, "How did we get here?" in terms of police brutality and the assumed criminality of Black people, read this book. It clearly outlines that policing in the United States didn't travel a long, winding path to get to this place, this is what it's been since the very beginning. Policing in the United States is doing exactly what it was intended to do. This is a book I could read again and again and learn something new each time. This should be manda ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

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 Anders ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 18, 2020 Karen Ashmore rated it really liked it

A historical documentation of the criminalization of race (or should it be the racialization of crime?) from Reconstruction to mid 20th century, with focus on how it played out in the North, esp Philadelphia. Well researched academic work. Great if you want to know more about the history of the connections between race and crime. A bit dry for me.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 05, 2012 Mark added it

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

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

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.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Mar 10, 2013 Jason Szanyi rated it it was amazing

Friends working in juvenile and criminal justice: this is a must read.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

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

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

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 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

flag 1 like · Like · see review

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.
...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 15, 2020 Sumit rated it it was amazing

This is an incredibly important book, tracing the notion of "black criminality" from Reconstruction to the present day. In short, every since slavery was abolished, sociologists have tried to use crime statistics to demonstrate that criminality is inherent to Black people - ignoring a) the significant bias in policing, prosecution, and sentencing (and at the same time the "look the other way" approach with whites), as well as b) the substantial economic and environmental disadvantages given that ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Oct 01, 2020 Bookfairy rated it really liked it

Shelves: did-not-finish

I did not read the entirety of this book, just large sections for a class.

If you want to know more about how police stations were formed, how discrimination and profiling have pervaded and persisted, this book may give you a window into that understanding.

Problems in the police system are not universal but because they began in small (and large) pockets *everywhere*, it stands to reason that it will take more understanding of where we were to understand where we are now.

I think most white peo ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Sep 01, 2020 Joe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: listened-to

This book does a fantastic job of breaking down how racists have used statistics against Black populations in America for years. Time and time again you see that Black crime is the problem of the Black population but white crime is the problem of society as a whole. One is completely excused and one is inexcusable. Every damn time. And it has been this way since America was founded (actually, since the colonies were settled.)

It's an important book because it calls in to question many assumptions ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Dec 17, 2020 Sharon Goforth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-book, non-fiction, read-in-2020, black-lives-matter, sociology

My actual rating for this book is 4.5 stars.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jan 27, 2021 Ivana rated it it was amazing

An astonishing book, a must read for every single American.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Sep 01, 2020 Meghan of Texas, Maryland rated it it was amazing

One of the best books I read for PhD prelims years ago.

It makes so many compelling connections between history, rotten treatment of Black folks in America and modern day criminal justice system.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Mar 21, 2020 Martha rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-stuff, important

If one has any awareness of how our white supremacist power structures function, little in this book -- a detailed, meticulously researched examination of the way American crime statistics have historically been used (by both law enforcement bodies and sociologists) to associated "Black" with "criminal" -- is surprising. It is, however, full of infuriating history, and is laid out so clearly and undeniably that the case Muhammad makes is something with which it's had to imagine even skeptics bei ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 18, 2020 Michelle Mayfield rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

Another book that helps me understand how slavery and cotton built the economy of our country.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend It | Stats | Recent Status Updates

Readers also enjoyed

See similar books…

Videos About This Book

Add a comment

Genres

Race

169 users

History

154 users

Nonfiction

148 users

Race > Anti Racist

87 users

Social Movements > Social Justice

57 users

Politics

50 users

Sociology

28 users

North American Hi... > American History

25 users

Cultural > African American

21 users

Mystery > Crime

14 users

See top shelves…

About Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

111 followers

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was formerly Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world's leading library and archive of global Black history. ...more

Books by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

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

Bootstrapped: How Conservative Thought SIdetracked Social Justice

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

More…

News & Interviews

Readers' Most Anticipated Books of March

Some interesting news for book nerds: According to recent industry research, book sales spiked dramatically in 2020–otherwise a rather...

Trivia About The Condemnation ...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

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

More quotes…