The Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

in American history from Rutgers University, specializing in 20 th century and African-American history. After college, he worked for a time at the financial advisory firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s degree in economics. Khalil Muhammad is a native of Chicago’s South Side. Recently, he wrote an op-ed about the Trayvon Martin case for The New York Times. Prior to his time working as a professor, Muhammad completed a fellowship at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City. While there, he wrote the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, in which he explored the roots of the popular conception of black criminality in America. Muhammad was an assistant professor of history at Indiana University for five years. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2011, Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and formerly the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. 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.Dr. What else but pathology could explain black failure in the land of opportunity? 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. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites - liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners - as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. 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 were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society.

In this illuminating book, Muhammad shifts our attention to the urban North as a crucial but overlooked site for the production and dissemination of those ideas and practices. Well known are the lynch mobs and racist criminal justice practices in the South that stoked white fears of black crime and shaped the contours of the New South. Khalil Gibran Muhammad chronicles how, when, and why modern notions of black people as an exceptionally dangerous race of criminals first emerged. Summary: 'The Idea of Black Criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America.

The Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad