The Condemnation of Blackness
Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad(Author)
Harvard University Press
Published on 15. February 2010
Book
Hardback
392 pages
978-0-674-03597-3 (ISBN)
Description
Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites - liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners - as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of 'separate but equal', what else but pathology could explain black failure in the 'land of opportunity'? The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime.
Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
Reviews / Votes
[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us. -- Darryl Pinckney New York Review of Books 20120524More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With printed dust jacket
Illustrations
7 halftones, 2 line illustrations, 3 cartoons
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-674-03597-3 (9780674035973)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library and Associate Professor of History, Indiana University.
Content
* List of Illustrations * Introduction: The Mismeasure of Crime * Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem * Writing Crime into Race: Racial Criminalization in the Age of Jim Crow * Incriminating Culture: The Limits of Racial Liberalism in the Progressive Era * Preventing Crime: White and Black Reformers in Philadelphia * Fighting Crime: Politics and Prejudice in the City of Brotherly Love * Policing Racism: Jim Crow Justice in the Urban North * Conclusion: The Conundrum of Criminality * Manuscript Sources * Notes * Index