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

Author: Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Narrator: Mirron Willis

Unabridged: 12 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/01/2017


Synopsis

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

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. 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. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity?"

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. 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.

About Khalil Gibran Muhammad

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. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world's leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Andre

I'm a big enthusiast for history books that inform the present by examining the past. This is such a book! I was grabbed right from the introduction, on page 1, when the question is asked, "How was the statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged?" Many ignore or are ill-infor......more

Goodreads review by Joseph

This is the kind of book that takes something that was fuzzy and sharpens it considerably. Although the title makes the book sound more expansive than it is, this book makes important contributions to our understanding of how blackness and crime became so closely associated in 20th century America.......more