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. As a result of this view money flowed into urban areas populated by white immigrant communities, as playgrounds, libraries and settlement houses were built in these neighborhoods. This emphasis on black self-improvement was adopted in a positive light by Booker T. Washington, whose Tuskegee Institute provided black Americans with industrial education meant to build their character and prepare them to work in the factories coming up all throughout the urban north. This ruffled the feathers of those white progressive reformers who had poured their money into institutions like Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, but Stemons’ work continued to demonstrate a definitive link between the industrial repression of black workers and black criminality, poking a further hole in the idea of black cultural inferiority as the primary cause of black criminality. The latter half of Blackness focuses on this intersection of how flawed social studies on black criminality went on to inform social programs focused on African American communities in the urban north, with reform efforts amongst white immigrant communities shown as evidence of the inequitable treatment of black communities and individuals by reformers and city governments alike. This kind of thinking naturally encouraged segregation amongst other oppressive and inherently unequal practices. Hoffman’s bias was further exposed when just the next year, in 1893 he examined data on the rise in white suicide rates in the urban north and attributed this to the stresses and strains modern industrial society put on people’s psyches. A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Du Bois, whose scholarly achievements contributed much to dispelling the idea of an inherent link between blackness and criminality, early in his career advocated for the importance of black self-improvement. The latter half of. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies. The Condemnation Of Blackness Analysis. Seeing the examination of government statistics as a means by which to expose society’s problems and guide reform efforts, in 1892 Hoffman examined statistics on the mortality of African Americans collected by a commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor and found that, on average, black Americans died at twice the rate of white Americans. His book shows part of the long journey of disentangling race from criminality and while Blackness certainly demonstrates to me that progress has been made on this, current events also indicate we have further to go. ( Log Out / White progressives enthusiastically supported this and similar causes with their voices and wallets, however in spite of this enthusiasm black workers continued to be shut out from most available good paying industrial jobs. These researchers and the reformers influenced by them eventually determined black communities and individuals had to strive independently to raise their level as a culture to a minimum standard before the reform efforts afforded to white immigrant communities would have any positive effect on them. focuses on this intersection of how flawed social studies on black criminality went on to inform social programs focused on African American communities in the urban north, with reform efforts amongst white immigrant communities shown as evidence of the inequitable treatment of black communities and individuals by reformers and city governments alike. 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… Even amongst some with sympathy for freeborn blacks and former slaves at the time there was a belief in their inherent racial inferiority and thereby doubt that black Americans could fully assimilate into modern American society. The Condemnation of Blackness Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Paperback) : Muhammad, Khalil Gibran : Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year [A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us. With no explanation from the data itself Hoffman simply interpreted these higher arrest rates as evidence of his preconceived notion of black moral inferiority. The condemnation of blackness : race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Mohammad asserts another reason the census data from 1890, as well as the figures from future sociological studies meant to examine black criminality, were seen as crucial was that social scientists at that time believed this data was completely objective and any conclusions drawn from it would thereby also be free of idealogical bias or prejudice. Muhammad wrote The Condemnation of Blackness in 2011 but it was reissued in 2019 with a new forward, and it was this version of the book I purchased to learn more. In the novel, the author takes part in tracing the differences and civil […] If evidence could be found in this census data that African Americans were inherently inferior, there was a justification for Jim Crow laws which kept them in a position of economic and social servitude. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”? 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. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, 1972-HV6197.U6 M85 2011. In the case of white mortality he was willing to accept environmental and other external factors as causes, but when it came to black mortality rates Hoffman believed it was something inherent to the race which caused them. Hoffman examined the data through the lens of his preexisting belief in black racial inferiority, and higher mortality rates were simply proof of the assumptions he had made before examining the data. The Negro Problem emerged in the wake of emancipation and centered on the question of whether the masses of newly freed slaves could assimilate into and succeed in modern American society i.e. The brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25th this year set off a wave of protests, marches and civic demonstrations that stretched across not only the United States, but across the world. One of Mohammad’s key assertions in Blackness is that these studies, and the conclusions drawn from them, were inherently flawed by the biases of those who conducted them. At the Washington Post, read an excerpt from The Condemnation of Blackness on racism as a primary reason that efforts to enforce police accountability have repeatedly foundered Read a New York Times Magazine interactive feature by Muhammad on the barbaric history of sugar, the “white gold” that fueled slavery for centuries (part of the NYT’s 1619 Project marking 400 years of American slavery) His research moving forward continued to demonstrate definitively that inequality and racial prejudice were the root causes of black criminality. Hoffman did not, however, come to these conclusions by rigorous examination of the data available. In his new book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, an assistant professor of history at Indiana University, tells "an unsettling coming-of-age story" about the idea of black criminality in modern America. Boas, Kellor and those they influenced shifted the conversation to seeing black criminality as “a social problem rather than a biological one” however, Mohammad asserts not enough progress was gained from this shift, because rather than seeing black and white immigrant communities as capable of the same kind of social progress, many researchers now asserted that essential differences still existed between these two groups, but these were found in culture rather than biology. He writes about how black identity is tied up in the idea of being criminal, and how that idea was perpetuated by social … Social scientists believed data from this census would demonstrate whether African Americans were fit for and could progress in American society, and thereby would contribute greatly to debate over the “Negro Problem”. Conversely, if the census proved African Americans were acting as productive and successful members of society then these racist policies would, seemingly, have no basis other than racism. His thesis, in my opinion, can be found on the first page of the introduction with Muhammad stating that ” This book tells an unsettling coming-of-age story. The Condemnation of Blackness : Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. By the time such social programs were being created for white immigrant communities belief in the incapability of black Americans to similarly improve themselves was beginning to be couched not in terms of biological inferiority, but rather in terms of cultural inferiority. In essence to get traction on their reform efforts black reformers had to concede in some degree to these false presumptions of black cultural inferiority. In 1910 Stemons would lead the creation of two organizations, the Association for Equalizing Industrial Opportunities (AEIO) and its auxiliary organization the League of Civic and Political Reform (LCPR), which jointly attacked the issues of black criminality and black economic discrimination. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Editorial Reviews. In “The Condemnation of Blackness”, Khalil Muhammad strives to educate the reader on the plight of the free black during the progressive era and beyond in the northern states. Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. Mohammad powerfully identifies this as a major progression in the thinking of social scientists and reformers on the topic of black criminality, and points to the work of another German, anthropologist Franz Boas, as being distinctly responsible for this shift in thought. “On the whole, Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness marks a tremendous contribution to scholarship on racism and reform in the Progressive era and will help point the way forward in ongoing conversations about crime, punishment, and representations of blackness in the United States. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. What The Condemnation of Blackness makes clear is that an association of blackness with a predisposition to criminality is something deeply engrained in the American psyche and the fight against this association has been a long one. W.E.B. Another figure who was critical of black self-improvement as a strategy to address the root causes of black criminality was James Stemons, a postal clerk and avid reformer living in Philadelphia. Guiding the reader through decades of American history Muhammad uncovers a vicious cycle of how racist presumptions about black Americans’ intelligence, lack of self-control or inherent unfitness for modern urban life influenced research on the question of black criminality, which in turn informed city governments’ housing & economic policies, as well as their policing practices. Hoffman attributed this to two causes, an “inferior constitution” and “gross immorality”, both of which led to higher rates of tuberculosis and venereal disease. Created Date: 8/23/2016 5:21:06 PM With the hard sciences failing to find any conclusive evidence, the only other popular arguments for or against black inferiority were anecdotal, which, in addition to being unsubstantiated, left them open to claims of regional or sectarian bias. “If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”. Adler, Jeffrey S. HV6197.U62 L83 2019 « Previous. 0 Reviews. It was hoped the 1890 could provide some evidence as to whether that was the case or not. The major actors in the last half of the book are the white law enforcement and the social reformers, who are in a sustained conflict. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The sports world has also responded, with the NBA making calls for racial justice on the backs of their jerseys and with footballers across all divisions of England and Germany’s professional leagues taking a moment of silence at the beginning of each match to kneel in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. He accomplishes this by demonstrating how social scientists consistently interpreted their data through their preexisting beliefs in black racial inferiority, sometimes even with benevolent intentions, and how the ways these studies were conducted failed to acknowledge or account for how inequalities of access and opportunity for African Americans affected crime rates or for how racist policing practices boosted black arrest rates. By Khalil Gibran and that public education would turn blacks into offend- Muhammad. However, the flawed research of Hoffman and others which equated blackness with criminality led to the prevailing belief that black Americans were incapable of similar progress, and they were therefore shut out of these social programs. Mohammad’s findings leaves no doubt, bias was inherent in how this data was created, collected and interpreted. The hard data of the census and other studies was meant to be above such biases, and provide a definite answer to the Negro Problem. Secondly, Hoffman refused to acknowledge the findings of other social scientists and medical professionals that things like environment or lack of access to adequate healthcare could be factors in these high mortality rates. In his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, author Khalil Gibran Muhammad works to answer a series of questions surrounding the “statistical link between blackness and criminality” (1), focusing on the core historical actors and the circumstances that were constructed to allow for the current reality that while African-Americans make up 12 percent of the general population, they make up 30 percent … Created Date: 8/23/2016 5:22:56 PM The Condemnation of Blackness : Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. After browsing the lists floating around online on the topic I settled on Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which proved to be an informative, insightful and powerful demonstration of how prevalent and deeply rooted systemic racism is in the United States, particularly when it comes to the way black Americans have been treated by law-enforcement and city governments. whether they could act as model and productive citizens in a participatory democratic society. Hoffman was far from the only researcher who interpreted statistics on white crime and mortality and attributed its causes to environmental or social factors, but refused to draw similar conclusions about black crime statistics, instead attributing this to inherent inferiority. The Condemnation of Blackness is the most thorough historical account of the enduring link between blackness and criminality in the making of modern urban America. ― Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America Featuring Jonathan Blanks and Khalil Gibran Muhammad Data are the lifeblood of public policy analysis. Black individuals are predisposed to be criminals only insofar as they are also predisposed to not have access to the jobs, safe communities and social programs that are proven to lower crime rates amongst communities regardless of race. On the whole, Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness marks a tremendous contribution to scholarship on racism and reform in the Progressive era and will help point the way forward in ongoing conversations about crime, punishment, and representations of blackness in the United States. Consistently white progressive reformers in Philadelphia saw Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants, which had their own stigmas as criminal ethnicities, as “Americans in Progress”, capable of becoming responsible and productive citizens if only they were given access to secure housing, respectable jobs and activities which kept their children off the streets. The Condemnation of Blackness Quotes Showing 1-6 of 6. In his book, The Condemnation of Blackness, historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad examines the history of blackness in the U.S., focusing particularly on the history of the Northern states in the years after the Emancipation Proclamation, where Black men were, and continue to be, incarcerated and killed by police officers at higher rates than White men. In this review I’ve really only scratched the surface of Mohammad’s argument, and there are troves of more powerful examples and salient arguments present in this book that truly elucidate what a persistent and pervasive problem in the history of the United States this association of blackness with criminality is. Mohammad states by the 1880s “the best scientific efforts to prove the physical inferiority of African Americans had fallen short” so those interested in keeping a subservient status quo with African Americans were turning to the social sciences and statistical analysis to find proof of inferiority. Harvard University Press, 2010 - History - 380 pages. Social scientists and reformers used crime statistics to mask and excuse anti-black racism, violence, and discrimination across the nation, especially in the urban North. Summary Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. The Condemnation of Blackness is the most thorough historical account of the enduring link between blackness and criminality in the making of modern urban America. A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. For one, the data Hoffman used in this study provided no statistics on rates of venereal disease or its prevalence as a cause of death. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a non-fiction book about the cultural ties that cause Americans to associate blackness with criminality, despite the much higher rate of white criminals in this country. Change ), white liberal and progressive reformers in the urban north, who would use this research to form widely differing strategies in dealing with crime and poverty in white immigrant versus black communities in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies. This was a dangerous decision, because this rhetoric could be interpreted as supporting the false assumptions many social scientists and reformers held that black individuals had an inherent predisposition to criminality or that black improvement had to come from within the black community, which would leave these reformers only further isolated from the social services and other assistances they knew for a fact would help to actually address the issue. Further, in 1901 female social scientist and reformer Frances Kellor investigated whether biology or environment was the largest factor in black criminality by conducting an extensive series of anthropomorphic and psychological tests on white and black female prisoners, Finding no significant differences between the two groups Kellor rightly concluded environment was the largest influence on criminality. Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, shows how American sociologists in the late 19th and early 20th century were both affected by and an influence on the racists attitudes of the time. For a time Du Bois’ vacillated in his public addresses between his personal “elitist sensibilities and Victorian concern about moral accountability” which emphasized black self-improvement, and his scholarly findings which saw black criminality as a result of black citizens being excluded from equal employment opportunities and social programs. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. Even when the root causes of black criminality were correctly identified, black reformers faced an uphill battle in convincing those with the power to create change that addressing these root causes would be effective, and while doing so they had to peddle in a false rhetoric that risked undermining their emphasis on the inherent equality of black individuals. In 1907 Stemons published a pamphlet called The North Holds the Key, in which he argued political disenfranchisement and racial violence in the South was a direct result of Northerns keeping black workers out of industrial jobs in their own cities. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the … Social scientists and reformers used crime statistics to mask and excuse anti-black racism, violence, and discrimination across the nation, especially in the urban North. Mohammad particularly focuses on the reform efforts in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, as the Great Migration swelled the number of black residents in the city of brotherly love. As Mohammad clarifies, “by framing black criminality as a key measure of black inferiority in the same way his predecessors had done through anatomical measurements and mortality data, Hoffman wrote crime into race and centered it at the heart of the Negro Problem”. Q&A with Jacqueline Mitton, coauthor of Vera Rubin: A Life, While astronomer Vera Rubin made significant contributions to our understanding of dark matter and championed the advancement of women in science, she is not that well known outside of the scientific community. ( Log Out / This inherent association of blackness with criminality forged by the flawed studies of Hoffman and others would take a long time to dispel and have far reaching ramifications for urban American society. Hoffman applied this same double standard in his examination of black crime statistics. The Condemnation of Blackness Book Description: Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies. As Mohammad asserts, this was a popular trend amongst many social scientists looking for an answer to “The Negro Problem” and their flawed research had a major influence on white liberal and progressive reformers in the urban north, who would use this research to form widely differing strategies in dealing with crime and poverty in white immigrant versus black communities in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. Unfortunately for Stemons the white politicians and reformers who had the money and power to affect real change on these issues were far more concerned with directly addressing black crime than with treating its root causes, so Stemons, as with almost all other black reformers of his time, found in order for his appeals to those in power to be effective he had to traffic in some degree in the false rhetoric of black inferiority.