Also the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which won the John Hope Franklin Best Book Award in American Studies. The prevailing feeling was that, in the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain Black people’s challenges in the “land of opportunity”?Ĭhronicling the beginning of the deeply embedded notion of Black people as a dangerous race of criminals, Muhammed explores a different side of the history of racism, weaving a narrative that is both engaging and educational. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in Northern prisons were pointed to by whites-liberals and conservatives alike-as proof of Blacks’ inferiority.
In the North, crime statistics, immigration trends, and references to America as the “land of opportunity” were woven into a cautionary tale about the threat Black people posed to modern urban society. In this talk, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals how the idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. But what do we know about the role the urban North played in shaping views on the intersection of race and crime in American society? The history of racism in the South is well known-the chain gangs, lynch mobs and views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow period are, for the most part, common knowledge today.
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