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A review by siria
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
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.