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A review by morganbirck
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
5.0
4.5 stars
In this book, Muhammad methodically lays out how we have come to associate “crime” and “Blackness” since the end of the Civil War. Focusing on some of the biggest sociological scholars and their studies of generally northern cities, he shows how white racial liberals in the first decades of the twentieth century often failed to separate the two concepts, while Black scholars at the time tried to stop the association from becoming permanent. He also showed how progressives of the time treated white immigrant populations differently than the Black population by treating crime as a symptom of bad social conditions, and not a biological or cultural defect for these immigrants, but as a biological failing of Black people. These actions entrenched the connection between Blackness and crime, and allowed immigrants to enter into whiteness as time went on—shown explicitly by the FBI’s uniform crime reports which in the 1940s stopped separating “foreign born” and “native” whites. Ultimately, Muhammad shows how the use of crime statistics does not give us a neutral understanding of crime in America. Instead, the interpretation of those statistics throughout the late 19th and early 20th century by those wishing to prove Black inferiority created the framework we still deal with today.
Reading this book for an Abolitionist Book Club, I was floored by the depth of this book. It reads a bit more like a textbook/academic book, because it is so dense and packed with research, statistics, and details from the decades after the Civil War and into the 20th century. But although not a quick read, this is an essential one. This book has completely upended my ideas about crime statistics, and has forced me to think about my own associations and biases. It is a must-read to provide context for any use of crime statistics or association between Blackness and crime. I cannot begin to tell you how important it is to read this book.
In this book, Muhammad methodically lays out how we have come to associate “crime” and “Blackness” since the end of the Civil War. Focusing on some of the biggest sociological scholars and their studies of generally northern cities, he shows how white racial liberals in the first decades of the twentieth century often failed to separate the two concepts, while Black scholars at the time tried to stop the association from becoming permanent. He also showed how progressives of the time treated white immigrant populations differently than the Black population by treating crime as a symptom of bad social conditions, and not a biological or cultural defect for these immigrants, but as a biological failing of Black people. These actions entrenched the connection between Blackness and crime, and allowed immigrants to enter into whiteness as time went on—shown explicitly by the FBI’s uniform crime reports which in the 1940s stopped separating “foreign born” and “native” whites. Ultimately, Muhammad shows how the use of crime statistics does not give us a neutral understanding of crime in America. Instead, the interpretation of those statistics throughout the late 19th and early 20th century by those wishing to prove Black inferiority created the framework we still deal with today.
Reading this book for an Abolitionist Book Club, I was floored by the depth of this book. It reads a bit more like a textbook/academic book, because it is so dense and packed with research, statistics, and details from the decades after the Civil War and into the 20th century. But although not a quick read, this is an essential one. This book has completely upended my ideas about crime statistics, and has forced me to think about my own associations and biases. It is a must-read to provide context for any use of crime statistics or association between Blackness and crime. I cannot begin to tell you how important it is to read this book.