I'm a big enthusiast for history books that inform the present by examining the past. This is such a book! I was grabbed right from the introduction, on page 1, when the question is asked, "How was the statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged?" Many ignore or are ill-informed about such a link. You hear today a lot of talk about "black-on-black" crime. Once you understand the history of linking blackness to criminality, and this book will cement that comprehension you

The falsehood of black criminality has always existed in America.This book is about one thing: the association of blackness with criminally focused on the turn of the century. Muhammad zeroes in on this time period with precision, research and an objective analysis. The conclusion is so obvious and horrifying that the banality of it all only adds to the injustice. America is a white supremecist state. It always has been and it is to this very day. State-sponsored violence maintains the racial ca...

The more of these kinds of books I read, the more inadequate I feel I am to review them. This one feels particularly difficult, because most of my reactions to this book were inarticulate internal screams of rage and frustration that, if I were forced to articulate them, would be best be summed up as "The more shit changes, the more it stays the same" and "How are these exact ideas and arguments still a thing??". This book covers a period of time from around 1890 to around 1930, and goes through...

This is the kind of book that takes something that was fuzzy and sharpens it considerably. Although the title makes the book sound more expansive than it is, this book makes important contributions to our understanding of how blackness and crime became so closely associated in 20th century America. Now, you may be thinking: "Didn't racists always tie blackness to crime in all of US history?" Answer: yes, but KGM shows that the period from 1890 (the US census that white race/crime experts saw as

This book examines how social science -- and social statistics, in particular -- deepened ideological beliefs about black criminality at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the north. It discusses the work of social Darwinists in the late 19th century who used statistics about the disproportionate arrests of black people in northern cities to support the view that blacks are inherently violent and immoral, and statistics about black mortality to show that they were dying out because of...

“Black-on-black crime” and “black criminality” are terms bandied about with depressing regularity in the modern U.S. media (particularly in the right wing media, though even outlets that brand themselves as progressive do this too). Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s perceptive book teases out the history of terms like these and the ideologies that underpin them. Muhammad argues that they are the product of a racist assumption that African-Americans are inherently “criminal”, an assumption that was legiti...

For anyone watching the news and asking themselves, "How did we get here?" in terms of police brutality and the assumed criminality of Black people, read this book. It clearly outlines that policing in the United States didn't travel a long, winding path to get to this place, this is what it's been since the very beginning. Policing in the United States is doing exactly what it was intended to do. This is a book I could read again and again and learn something new each time. This should be manda...

I picked up Dr. Muhammad's book after reading his thought-provoking article in the New York Times, "Playing the Violence Card", earlier this month. In the wake of recent murders, such as those in Florida and Oklahoma, which seem to hinge on issues of race, Dr. Muhammad asked us to scrutinize the origins of America's common conflation of blackness with criminality. By examining the use and misuse of racialized statistics, and comparing the experiences of blacks, poor whites, and european immigran...

I'm tardy to this party as this book was published in 2010. Almost 12 years later the information in this book has become common knowledge for most of us yet this book is still helpful to continue the conversation. Narrator = EXCELLENT!Writing style = Well researched, slightly dy but it's not supposed to have you on the edge of your seat. Execution = Well done

A little hard to get through, but definitely well researched and very interesting subject material. A must read for anyone interested in the origins of black criminality.

This thorough analysis of how the late 1800s and early 1900s helped to continue and enhance the idea of inferiority and criminality of black people in the US is just one great reference. The emotional toll this book takes it not simply because the toll bad science and rampant personal bias took on relations between people, but even more so because the situations described and the cherry picking of data still occur today. It would be wonderful to see this book bridged with a modern volume that in...

Good, important book. I knew what I was getting into when I chose this, but I still can’t give it a fair rating because it was so academic. I’m glad I read it, learned a lot, and recommend it to others!

08/2012I saw Muhammad on Moyers & Co. a couple of weeks ago and he sold me on his book, but he also caught my attention and respect in that he recognized the experiences of Native Americans as the civil/human rights case that has still to be fully faced in this country. I appreciated that he took time away from a discussion on black folks to remind people about that.http://billmoyers.com/episode/encore-...

Fantastic history of the merging of blackness and criminality. He tells a nuanced story here of blacks and whites, progressives and racists, north and south--the ways in which all these groups reacted to and spun a tale of black criminality to justify further subjugation. essential book.

somehow, my original review of this book vanished.Luckily I posed the same review to my blog."If you are interested in how the systematic racial structures became established in the East and West then this book is a must have. The historical documentation that i found in this book might have taken a life time of searching in the realm of obscurity to find on my own. This book is an instant classic and has earned its place along side the classics of African American Studies like the Mis-Education...

Condemnation of blackness is a study of race and crime, but the author also has a handle on progressive era ideology, urban politics, and that old phrenology race science stuff (researching that must have gotten tiresome). No one can ever call this book under researched. In fact, the notes themselves are worth reading. Muhammad is a real historian's historian, and that might put some general readers off because his arguments are subtle, accurate, and comprehensive. This isn't the kind of stuff t...

"There are three kinds of lies, someone has said, 'white lies, black lies, and statistics.'" (p 48) Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America" looks at how data/statistics created the construct of the "negro problem" that established itself into American society by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler in 1884. Utilizing data, particularly from early census records and crime statistics, Shaler and others created a narrative that portrayed Af...

This is an excellent study of how race and crime came to be linked during the period between Reconstruction and the 1930s. Muhammad shows how crime statistics, stripped of their socio-economic context, were used to bolster racist arguments about African American criminality and traces the development of theories about supposed racial inferiority. He demonstrates how the application of social science theories impacted on African American communities, usually to their detriment.Muhammad's comparis...

This is an incredibly important book, tracing the notion of "black criminality" from Reconstruction to the present day. In short, every since slavery was abolished, sociologists have tried to use crime statistics to demonstrate that criminality is inherent to Black people - ignoring a) the significant bias in policing, prosecution, and sentencing (and at the same time the "look the other way" approach with whites), as well as b) the substantial economic and environmental disadvantages given that...

ESSENTIAL. especially for any criminologists...