For months, I have had Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” on a bookshelf. I was looking forward to reading it but have been distracted by other books. I finally finished the book over this weekend.

In the introduction, Gibran (2010) explains that the book is a “biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America (p.1).” A central premise of the book is that white reformers used crime statistics to explain and humanize white immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast, crime statistics were used to reinforce and “condemn” the idea of black criminality. This data was offered as proof of black inferiority and therefore to justify further criminalization. This was in stark contrast to how white progressives in the early 20th century used crime data related to white immigrants. That information was marshaled to call for more resources to help better assimilate these newcomers into American society. Muhammad (2010) writes:

“For these reformers, immigrants’ humanity trumped the scale of their crimes and the cultural expressions of their social resistance.By contrast, African American crime to many white race-relations experts stood as an almost singular reflection of black culture and humanity (p.274).”

Gibran traces the publication of the 1890 census as a key moment when “prison statistics for the first time became the basis of a national discussion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population (p.3).”

In light of the fact that I have been immersed in examining the social construction of black criminality over the past few months, this book is timely and extremely relevant. Part of what I wanted to do with the Black/Inside exhibition was to make this process of the social construction of black criminality more visible. I think that we were partly successful in achieving that goal.

Here’s Gibran talking about himself and his book with Bill Moyers:

Khalil Muhammad on Facing Our Racial Past from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.