Ezra's Bookshelf

The Condemnation of Blackness

by Khalil Gibran Muhammad  · 417 pages · ~7.5 hrs

HistoryRace & Identity

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Crime statistics are not objective facts but social constructions, and historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals how they were used to forge an association between Blackness and criminality in American thought. After Emancipation, statisticians began disaggregating data by race, and the resulting numbers showed higher crime rates among Black populations, particularly in Northern cities. White commentators cited these statistics as evidence of inherent racial inferiority, while the structural factors producing the numbers, discrimination, poverty, unequal enforcement, went unexamined. Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard, traces how this statistical discourse developed differently for Black Americans than for European immigrants. Irish and Italian crime rates were attributed to the dislocations of immigration, temporary conditions that assimilation would resolve. Black crime rates were attributed to racial character, permanent conditions that required containment. The book shows how this racial logic shaped policing, housing, and social welfare policies for a century. Neighborhoods with high Black populations were treated as requiring surveillance rather than investment. The legacy persists in contemporary debates about crime, policing, and racial disparities in incarceration. Readers seeking to understand the origins of mass incarceration and the statistics that justify it will find Muhammad's history essential.

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