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. 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. He writes about how black identity is tied up in the idea of being criminal, and how that idea was perpetuated by social … 11 likes. 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. The second half of The Condemnation of Blackness centers around a case study of Philadelphia, “The City of Brotherly Love”. With no explanation from the data itself Hoffman simply interpreted these higher arrest rates as evidence of his preconceived notion of black moral inferiority. This kind of thinking naturally encouraged segregation amongst other oppressive and inherently unequal practices. The Condemnation Of Blackness Analysis. 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. 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. Much of Blackness’ first half entails Mohammad’s systematic destruction of the supposed objectivity of these 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ( Log Out /  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. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. What Mohammad works toward and definitively demonstrates in this book is that race has no factor in criminality. 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. Murder in New Orleans : the creation of Jim Crow policing. This in turn led to higher arrest and incarceration rates for blacks, which, again, in turn, created crime statistics that reinforced these preconceived notions of black criminality. 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. 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. 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. He received his PhD in American History from Rutgers University and his research focuses on the intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is also the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. 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. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. 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. According to these scientists and reformers black Americans were still inferior, but now they were seen as capable of improvement. What follows is less of a review, and more of a summary of Muhammad’s main argument and some of the most important takeaways I found in his book. 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. Editorial Reviews. In the novel, the author takes part in tracing the differences and civil […] By weaving together the histories of scientific racism, migration, immigrant and African American uplift … In the study about the Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of a Modern Urban America, is an exciting book and research that deals with the groundbreaking of history in the United States of America pegged on the racial aspects. His conclusion was based solely on the anecdotal assertion that any physician who treated African-Americans would attest roughly 75% of them had venereal diseases. item 2 The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Mod (Digital 2019) 2 - The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Mod (Digital 2019) $7.99 Free shipping 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. 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. 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. On the NPR podcast Throughline, listen to Khalil Gibran Muhammad explicate the parallel development of policing in America’s north and south—which in both regions hinged on the use of brutal force to control Black Americans: “[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”—Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books. 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. 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 attributed this to two causes, an “inferior constitution” and “gross immorality”, both of which led to higher rates of tuberculosis and venereal disease. It was believed these social assistances would mitigate the moral degradations forced upon white immigrant communities by the evils of modern industrial society and enable them to become productive American citizens. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. "The Condemnation of Blackness demonstrates and explains how ideas of racial inferiority and crime became fastened to African Americans by contrast to ideas of class and crime that shaped views of European immigrants and working-class whites." These researchers concluded black criminality was a result of African American’s underdeveloped culture, which thereby required its own unique response vis a vis the reform efforts provided to white immigrants, whose culture was closer to the supposed Anglo-Saxon ideal, if black Americans were to become fully assimilated and productive members of society. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism … They were said to be naturally less intelligent, naturally impulsive or physically inferior. 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. 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. 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. The latter half of. 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. 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. 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. 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. Hoffman applied this same double standard in his examination of black crime statistics. 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. When the hard sciences could no longer support such assertions the social sciences were used to prove some sort of inherent inferiority, and the number of black criminals as a percent of the population, among other statistics, was deemed to show definitive proof of inferiority. Created Date: 8/23/2016 5:22:56 PM Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. 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. 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. In addition to the streets of American cities like Portland and Chicago protests were seen in cities in Germany and England. Others, particularly in the South, had more nefarious hopes in this data, as they were looking to find an objective justification for the continued social subjugation and economic exploitation of their former slaves. 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. His research moving forward continued to demonstrate definitively that inequality and racial prejudice were the root causes of black criminality. Khalil Gibran Muhammad. By contrast when Stemons talked to middle-class blacks about what they could do to help he advocated for the same kinds of economic and social programs that were advocated by white reformers for white immigrants. 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. 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. 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… 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 5:21:06 PM 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 “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. 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. 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.

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