By Imani Perry

Khalil Gibran Muhammad introduces his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race Crime and the Making of Modern America, with a contemporary lens. He cites the dire reality that “Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African American…” and describes the commonplace of associating blackness with crime in the contemporary United States.

The body of the book, however, looks to the past, and searches for the root of this association between blackness and crime. While many historians have focused on the 1960s as an important turning point in the promotion of the idea of black criminality, Muhammad argues that we must look back even further. He focuses on the period between the 1880s and 1930s, and concentrates his study on the urban north, particularly Philadelphia.

He identifies the publication of the 1890 census, the first time prison statistics were published, as the occasion for the emergence of a national discourse on black crime. In that data the overrepresentation of black people in U.S. prisons was starkly apparent. Over the years, social science research would both trace this phenomenon statistically, and offer explanations for it. Muhammad describes the explanations offered for black crime over the course of 5 decades, which fit into the following types: biological inferiority, cultural inferiority, and for the more progressive and African-American criminologists: conditions of economic and social marginalization.

Muhammad’s research is meticulous. He masterfully combines intellectual history with social history. He describes how social reformers who worked on the uplift of poor European immigrants, while neglecting African Americans, were guided by what they had been taught about race. They had learned about the intractability of black depravity from books and articles that had the authority of social science attached to them. As well, as European ethnics became “whites” they were no longer singled out as the source of particular social ills, in data or dialogue, the way black people would continue to be well into the 20th century.

For people with a particular interest in African-American intellectual and activist history, this book is also a wonderful resource. Muhammad offers detailed analyses of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro, Sadie Mosell’s doctoral dissertation and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro in Chicago Study. He rigorously analyzes their writings, both lauding and criticizing them. He also thoughtfully considers how they faced the complex task of working against pervasive racism in housing markets, policing, and employment, while pursuing scholarly knowledge. Significantly, this work refocuses our attention on DuBois the social scientist, a role that has fallen into the background as greater attention has been paid to DuBois as an activist, historian, and essayist.

However, the difficulty of this book is that it is written for a scholarly audience. It is very dense, and the author doesn’t provide an explicit roadmap for the reader at the beginning of each chapter. As an academic book it is extremely successful. But for a broader readership, even though the content is extremely compelling and pertinent to contemporary issues, it will be a challenging read.

That said, it is worthwhile to make one’s way through it. It is powerful to see how many of the current debates on race, poverty and crime are actually quite old.

And it is alarming that there is nothing new about the arguments that black imprisonment can be explained by deficient black culture and immorality, rather than unemployment, poverty, inadequate schooling, unequal police surveillance and simple bigotry in criminal justice. Muhammad shows us how the same arguments are being made about black criminality now as were made during the Jim Crow era. This should make us skeptical, to say the least, about how accurate those arguments are today as well.

Imani Perry is a professor at Princeton University who studies race and African- American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences.