The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (review)

Over the last several years much has been written concerning the plight of African American males. On every level the picture has not been very pretty. High incarceration rates, shortened life expectancies due to drugs, health issues, and urban violence have plagued black men. Many of the discussions have focused on the inner cities of America although the situation is not totally restricted there. Education levels are low while unemployment levels are high, and following past historical trends this was the case even before the Great Recession of 2008.

Even though one can see that African American men in positions of prominence and authority, especially with the election of the first black man to the American Presidency, it does not erase the fact that the burden of being a black male in the United States has not eased. Indeed, the pressures have increased manifold.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s study, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is not only timely but also groundbreaking historiographically. Muhammad traces the civil discourse on the linkage of race and crime to the late 19^th and early twentieth centuries. He examines the rise of social science and the uses to which Progressive reformers, black and white, placed its ideas and conclusions on crime in shaping public policy. It becomes shockingly clear how deeply embedded crime was linked to race and, in particular, blackness and thereby became the new mark of oppression. Not that crime was never associated with black people prior to this period, but for many slavery was the answer to civilizing if not retraining the presumed bestial nature of black people.

With the influx of immigrants and the rapid industrialization and expansion of the cities, reformers and Progressive policy makers, aided by social science, categorized and absorbed the new arrivals from Europe while simultaneously building a case for condemning blacks as inherently criminal and forcing them into ghettoization.

Massively researched and crisply written, Muhammad’s study takes on the traditional school of thought regarding the making of black ghettoes and the victimization of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, this work represents a new trend in African American historiography: a wonderful blend of intellectual, social, and, implicitly, political history.

Muhammad shrewdly begins this study by examining the Nathaniel Shaler’s commentaries on the “Negro Problem.” Shaler, a forerunner of today’s more subtle and intellectualized racism, outlined the parameters of this “problem” and concluded that “… these people are a danger to America greater and more insuperable than any of those that menace the other great civilized states of the world” (15).

Muhammad deftly moves from describing the racialist ideology of the period to how thinkers, reformers, and policy makers crafted solutions to deal with this “menace” to society. What is truly refreshing (therefore breaking new ground) is how Muhammad weaves the thoughts of blacks and whites on these issues. Sensitive to the intraracial intellectual nuances played out among black intellectuals, Muhammad uncovers the complicated perspectives that that back reformers, especially those in the North, held toward Southern black migrants, as well as those of the lower class. Muhammad’s analyses of the liberal and conservative ideas of blacks and whites should cause a great deal of rethinking about the nature of the Progressive era in general and the development and role of the black intelligentsia in shaping public policy in particular.

The driving engine in this book is social science and how it is used to solve (or worsen) the state of race in a rapidly changing American society. Here again, Khalil Gibran Muhammad is presenting a fresh look, indeed, a more complex picture of an important historical period that has often overlooked the black presence within it. It is also important to note that many of our problems today with the way that we view black people and black men...