khalil muhammad the condemnation of blackness

A fairly dry monotone added to my frustration. The narrator is clear but didn’t help bring the book to life. I don’t disagree with the books analysis but it just didn’t feel like I was reading a book for a broad non-academic audience. It is instead a carful retelling of an impressive set of primary sources. The author rarely speaks actively and only occasionally draws together the lessons from his work. It’s a great case study, but it’s extremely dry and really goes into more details than most people could possibly want. There is also a very large chunk of the book that focuses on the different help given to black southern immigrants vs European immigrants in Philadelphia. The simple point - high rates of black incarceration reflect racist society, NOT that black people are inherently or culturally more prone to commit crime does not need all this detail. But I would not recommend to a broader audience. If you are writing a PhD thesis in either of these topics, the book will be interesting to you. The book sticks very carefully to reviewing the history of thought in sociology and criminology. It starts with the 1890 census and slowly works forward about 50 years (although the main focus is on 1890-1920).

The book provides an incredibly detailed (perhaps excruciating) history of how black crime statistics in the US were interpreted. It’s not really designed for a broad audience. This book isn’t exactly what i was expecting. In the heyday of 'separate but equal', what else but pathology could explain black failure in the 'land of opportunity'? The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime.Ĭhronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in Northern prisons were seen by many whites - liberals and conservatives, Northerners and Southerners - as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority.

We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.įollowing the 1890 census - the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery - crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known.

Khalil muhammad the condemnation of blackness