The Condemnation of Blackness

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is a nonfiction history published in 2010. Muhammad, an American historian specializing on race and public policy, studies the connections between Blackness, crime, and the makings of America’s urban North after the Civil War. The book has garnered significant accolade, winning awards such as the 2011 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and landing on the Vera Institute of Justice’s “Best Books of 2019” list.

Muhammad argues that the urban North played a significant role in constructing and perpetuating ideas of “Black criminality” from 1890 to 1940. Black criminality refers to the systemic conflation of crime and vice with Blackness. Muhammad asserts that from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, the category of white crime was effectively erased while the category of Black crime was emphasized in national crime statistics. As a result, the idea of Black criminality became embedded in the American consciousness and exists in society to this day.

This study guide references the 2019 edition of The Condemnation of Blackness with Muhammad’s new preface.

Summary

In his initial chapters, Muhammad examines the beginnings of Black criminality as an idea. He attributes the rise of this ideology, in part, to the “Negro Problem,” a term that scholars of postbellum America used to describe white anxieties over Black citizens’ integration into free society following emancipation. The “Negro Problem” reinvigorated some white intellectuals’ needs to secure proof of Black inferiority, as Black emancipation threatened the nation’s white power structure. In the late 19th century, race researchers such as Nathanial Shaler argued that the social sciences and statistical methodologies provided seemingly objective ways of proving Black inferiority. Following the 1890 census, which showed disproportionately high Black incarceration rates, scholars like Shaler weaponized statistics to fuel their racist agenda.

The power of these racial statistics was cemented by scholars like Frederick L. Hoffman. With his book Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro in 1896, Hoffman brought racial statistics into the popular discourse and effectively institutionalized ideas of Black criminality. In Chapter 2, Muhammad analyzes the efforts of Black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who were working at the same time as Hoffman, to actively combat the growing popularity of the theory of Black criminality. These scholars published research criticizing popular white supremacist arguments. Du Bois and Wells, along with other Black peers, asserted that Black crime rates were a result of environmental factors (e.g., poor housing, lack of employment opportunities) and not biology.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Muhammad draws readers’ attention to a class of white progressives who worked alongside Black race reformers to combat the ideology of Black inferiority. These white progressives, called “racial liberals,” first arose in the early 20th century and were active critics of scholars who argued that Black people were biologically inferior to whites. However, in their efforts to explain higher crime rates in Black communities, racial liberals argued that it was because Black culture had inherent flaws that needed to be fixed from within. Racial liberals then perpetuated Black criminality, even while attempting to criticize it, because they merely displaced explanations of Black inferiority from biology to culture. Racial liberals’ opinions that the issues facing Black communities could only be fixed from within were used by those in power (e.g., Mayors, community leaders, charity/social aid workers) to withhold resources to help Black neighborhoods. Instead, this aid was given to white and immigrant workers. This essentially created a “color line” within the disbursement of social resources, where the system benefited white and immigrant communities and neglected Black communities.

Muhammad elaborates on the color line in Chapters 5 and 6. By the 1910s, Black criminality had become an idea so dominant in the American consciousness that it contributed to a wave of racial violence and riots that spread through the entire country. Crime fighting efforts ramped up as Northern cities attempted to regain control and rid the streets of vice and crime. City governments routinely focused their crime fighting efforts on cleaning up white and immigrant neighborhoods while marginalizing Black ones. Black community leaders like James Stemons then tried to take matters into their own hands. Stemons, working from W. E. B. Du Bois’s calls for Black-led crime fighting efforts, created the League of Civic and Political Reform to combat violence and vice in the Black community. Mayor Blankenburg of Philadelphia refused to lend aid to Stemons’s LCPR, and the League eventually failed because of this lack of systemic support.

In the 1920s, a new generation of Black race reformers emerged who took more militant approaches to defeating racism. Henderson H. Donald, for instance, took a radical approach to critiquing Black criminality and argued that high Black crime rates were because of discriminatory policing. This reframed the Black crime discourse as a policing issue, not a racial one. Scholars like Donald pushed the envelope of Black anti-racist scholarship of the 20th century and effectively introduced systemic discrimination into national conversations on race and crime. They permanently changing how these topics would be discussed.

After the failure of Prohibition, the federal government decided to institute sweeping changes to the criminal justice system in 1930. This included a new uniform system for recording, storing, and analyzing crime statistics. While racial categories for white and immigrant crimes were erased in the new data system, categories noting Black crime remained. Muhammad argues that this effectively erased white crimes while Black crimes were emphasized in national crime statistics. Notably, this data system is still in place in the United States today. Thus, even despite groundbreaking findings by race reformers like Henderson and the sweeping criminal justice reform of the 1930s, the idea of Black criminality survived.

The Condemnation of Blackness reflects the dangers of viewing crime statistics as purely objective, cautioning its readers to consider the social contexts surrounding such data. Muhammad argues that it is up to future scholars to decide how they will read and incorporate national crime data into their research. Scholars can choose to use crime statistics to perpetuate historically oppressive ideas, or they can remember the history of Black criminality and read these statistics with empathy for the people that lie behind the numbers on the page.