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The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
by
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
Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration tr ...more
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Hardcover, First Edition (U.S.), 380 pages
Published
February 15th 2010
by Harvard University Press
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Start your review of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

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

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

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

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
...more

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
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

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

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

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 ...more
This book covers a period of time from around 1890 to around 1930, and goes through ...more

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

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
Muhammad's comparis ...more

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

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!

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

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

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.

Sep 05, 2012
Mark
added it
A tough but essential read for understanding modern crime statistics and their relation to race.

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
...more

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
...more

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

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
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

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

My actual rating for this book is 4.5 stars.

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