The Condemnation of Blackness Quotes

“If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“For white Americans of every ideological stripe—from radical southern racists to northern progressives—African American criminality became one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment, and/or acceptance of racial violence as an instrument of public safety.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested blacks on suspicion and brought them “into court without a bit of evidence of any offense.” A former chief of police admitted that black migrants “naturally” attracted “greater suspicion than would attach to the white man.” Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners to abandon”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface

“But Du Bois could not entirely expunge his personal views from his own scholarship, a limit he recognized and fully admitted in the opening pages of The Philadelphia Negro.141 From “Conservation” to the American Academy of Political and Social Science address to the final Philadelphia report, there is an unmistakable tension between his elitist sensibility and Victorian concern about individual moral accountability, and his professional view of crime as a “tangible phenomena of Negro Prejudice.” In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois did not hesitate to moralize against the young black gamblers and prostitutes of Philadelphia’s corrupt Seventh Ward, or to wage a full-scale rhetorical attack on the immorality of poor black southerners.142 In Du Bois’s early writings, in Hoffman’s writings, and in the writings of many others”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface

“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”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“In the preface to Southern Horrors, she wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially designed race-conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color-blind, and incontrovertible.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“White liberals created a hierarchy that privileged white over black criminals. White people’s crimes were a primary reason to help them. It was just the opposite for black people. Their crimes were used as evidence to contain and control them. Black people were redlined out of the decriminalizing, rehabilitative policies of the Progressive era, as well as the New Deal and the postwar suburbs. They were locked into a statistical ghetto that helped justify the physical one they would fight so hard to escape. History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful political sense. Crime statistics have never been just about behavior no matter how obvious it may seem that numbers speak for themselves. They are proxies for beliefs, a way of defining reality and seeing things. Whatever truth they represent in counting actual arrests or real prisoners is itself a reflection of intense social and political struggles. The choice to single out this group or that one in crime data has always been a reflection of ideological and political power, and still is.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“There is an arc of history that connects lynching’s past to policing’s present. But some Americans reject this view. They exclaim Blue Lives Matter in utter defiance of Black Lives Matter activism. And they falsely equate doing a job, even if at times a dangerous one, with living in one’s own skin. But there are no blue lives. Blue is not a shade of humanity. Blue is not protected by civil rights laws.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“Ideas about black criminality are part of slavery’s legacy of justifying why black bodies have been used for white wealth creation, electoral politics, and popular culture. The end of the Civil War did not bring an end to plunder, political race-baiting, and blackface. White supremacy did not die with slavery. It evolved during Reconstruction. And modern ideas emerged, at the time, to rationalize removing black bodies out of government offices and back into cotton fields.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

“The United States didn’t get to mass incarceration without mass participation in the criminalization of black and brown people by liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners, Republicans and Democrats, whites and blacks. By a long shot, the United States is the world’s leading jailer. And no aspect of national life—from the economy to education to electoral politics—has been untouched by the scale and scope of racialized policing and punishment.”
― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America