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authorjbr's review against another edition
5.0
Excellent history, well researched, a little dry but that’s not the point.
teriboop's review against another edition
4.0
"There are three kinds of lies, someone has said, 'white lies, black lies, and statistics.'" (p 48) Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America" looks at how data/statistics created the construct of the "negro problem" that established itself into American society by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler in 1884. Utilizing data, particularly from early census records and crime statistics, Shaler and others created a narrative that portrayed African Americans as grossly inferior to white Americans. Included in the "white American" class were other European immigrants, like Irish Americans who were also once thought of as lowly people in white Americans' eyes. Muhammad asks, "…how did European immigrants – the Irish and the Italians and the Polish, for example – gradually shed their criminal identities while blacks did not?" (p 5) As the European immigrant was enveloped into the category of white Americans, the disparity grew for African Americans. The issue of Black criminality was labeled as “black people’s problem” while white criminality was society’s problem. This narrative framed black criminality as an indicator of African Americans' inferiority in the late 19th to early 20th century American society that we see today.
Muhammad also looks at the activists and reformers who attempted to change the narrative, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams and a crime wave between 1917-1919 in response to heightened violence in policing and punishment.
Working with data daily in my job, I know how quantitative data can be used to twist a narrative, however, you need. Numbers themselves don't lie, but how one uses those numbers, how one compiles and extrapolates them can be telling or not. It's easy to see how the data was used so many years ago to create a mindset that sadly lives on today.
Muhammad also looks at the activists and reformers who attempted to change the narrative, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams and a crime wave between 1917-1919 in response to heightened violence in policing and punishment.
Working with data daily in my job, I know how quantitative data can be used to twist a narrative, however, you need. Numbers themselves don't lie, but how one uses those numbers, how one compiles and extrapolates them can be telling or not. It's easy to see how the data was used so many years ago to create a mindset that sadly lives on today.
siria's review against another edition
4.0
“Black-on-black crime” and “black criminality” are terms bandied about with depressing regularity in the modern U.S. media (particularly in the right wing media, though even outlets that brand themselves as progressive do this too). Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s perceptive book teases out the history of terms like these and the ideologies that underpin them.
Muhammad argues that they are the product of a racist assumption that African-Americans are inherently “criminal”, an assumption that was legitimised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by racially biased readings of statistics. This racist construction of African-American criminality was then used to justify further acts of prejudice, including segregation laws and anti-black violence. Muhammad draws heavily on government reports, newspaper accounts, and works in the then infant fields of sociology and criminology to prove that “the numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have.” (277) His argument is on the whole persuasive, and I don’t want to condemn him for not writing the book that I would have written, because I could wish for a little bit more cultural history here—some way of tracing how these largely academic ideas hop the fence into pop culture. This is a fine book overall, and sadly in 2017, never more urgent or more necessary.
Muhammad argues that they are the product of a racist assumption that African-Americans are inherently “criminal”, an assumption that was legitimised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by racially biased readings of statistics. This racist construction of African-American criminality was then used to justify further acts of prejudice, including segregation laws and anti-black violence. Muhammad draws heavily on government reports, newspaper accounts, and works in the then infant fields of sociology and criminology to prove that “the numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have.” (277) His argument is on the whole persuasive, and I don’t want to condemn him for not writing the book that I would have written, because I could wish for a little bit more cultural history here—some way of tracing how these largely academic ideas hop the fence into pop culture. This is a fine book overall, and sadly in 2017, never more urgent or more necessary.
hooksbookswanderlust's review against another edition
4.0
Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
So often, as someone who was raised in the North (though with a tour of duty in the South as well), I used to believe that I was not racist, particularly because I hail from the northern states, and frown at the outright, in-your-face racism of the South. I mean, the North won the Civil War after all. Clearly we’re the good guys, right?
I’m ashamed to say that I thought that way for far too long, blind to the systemic racism inherent in everything everywhere in this country, even here in the North, and especially that within myself. Thankfully, books like this one were written.
The Condemnation of Blackness attempts to explore the origins of how Northerners have allowed systemic racism and prejudice to survive, going back to the Great Migration of black people to the North after the Civil War and understanding the varying viewpoints and approaches to what was called “the negro problem.” The perception of blacks as an inferior and fundamentally different race laid the foundation for race relations after Reconstruction through today.
For white Americans of every ideological stripe—from radical southern racists to northern progressives—African American criminality became one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment, and/or acceptance of racial violence as an instrument of public safety.
This book has so much important information, diligently collected and thoughtfully interpreted, citing both scholarly papers from well-known activists and progressives, as well as anecdotal accounts, lending credence to what Muhammad illustrates is not simply a problem of the past, but of the present as well.
This book opens one’s eyes to the minutia that defines the subtleties of prejudice in a way that is at times jaw dropping and at others simply unbelievable. In the wake of police brutality and shootings and Black Lives Matter, Muhammed clearly and unequivocally links the prejudiced perceptions fostered in the post-Reconstruction North (citing stories, writings, and events from Chicago and Philadelphia) with the events and prejudice we still see today and how it directly influences criminal behavior and white reaction to it.
Progressives rewrote white and immigrant criminality just as early Civil Rights activists rewrote, for a time, black criminality. The measure of crime in both cases was not racial inferiority but rather compassion towards the least among them. Sympathy and faith in humanity were chosen over scorn and contempt.
Of particular interest, and indeed the biggest indicator of the different ways criminality is understood and combatted among races, is the different perception of foreign-born white immigrants and blacks. Great care is taken in explaining and exposing this difference. Where once crime reports showed arrest rates primarily belonging to foreign-born whites and blacks, a generation or two later, “foreign-born” was dropped as they were assimilated into American society, in contrast to the blacks who were left to “police their own.”
I confess that the only negative I can assign to the book isn’t really the book’s fault, it’s the mode with which I consumed it, as an audiobook. This book, in my opinion, is not something that is easy to listen to, not simply because of the content, because it is definitely NOT easy to listen to for that reason alone, but because the depth of research quoted and the academic way this book is written. I feel that I, personally, would have been better off reading the physical book, that way I could take my time with it, re-reading passages as needed, looking up referenced material to further understand what the author was trying to convey, looking up words I’m unfamiliar with (I’m the first to admit that this book is way smarter than I am) and really giving it my full attention. Listening to the book when my hands are otherwise occupied (listening in the car, while I’m crocheting, etc) didn’t allow for me to really sit with the words and explore them the way I would have if I were holding the book in my hands. That said, whether reading a physical copy or the audiobook version, this book definitely reads like an academic thesis, and the writing itself tends toward the dry facts. The only real emotion evoked was when the author recounted stories of individual blacks’ experiences of racism, ignorance, contempt and outright brutality. The rest of the book reads very much like an academic dissertation meant to be read by other academics. So really….take your time with this book.
If you are looking for more understanding as to how we got where we are, how we can change our own behaviors and ways of thinking to live a more anti-racist life, then I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book. Just make sure it’s the physical version and not the audiobook version ;).
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