The Condemnation of Blackness

Muhammad’s study of ideas and discourse about real and imagined crime among African Americans is a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand this history.

He has painstakingly assembled the intellectual, pseudo-scientific, and popular conversations Americans had about the subject from the end of slavery until well into the 20th century.

This work has been particularly important for me because he brings our attention to the urban North and the use of census data, statistics, eugenics, etc., to condemn blackness as a dangerous threat to be contained.

There is no way to truthfully understand race and crime in America without… show more.

Focused on early twentieth-century Philadelphia, Muhammad unpacks the ways that “statistics” were made to lie about Black criminality (and still do). He shows how the Progressive-era impulse to aid and rehabilitate those accused of criminal behavior vanished when the accused were Black. An intellectual history of both white social scientists and Black thinkers and activists from a range of classes, the book is a tour de force and must-read for anyone interested in issues of cities, crime, and racism.