khalil muhammad the condemnation of blackness

Read a 2018 Harvard Magazine profile of Muhammad.On WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, listen to Professor Muhammad discuss how the sugar industry fueled the trade in enslaved people-and, in turn, the entire Atlantic economy.Read a New York Times Magazine interactive feature by Muhammad on the barbaric history of sugar, the “white gold” that fueled slavery for centuries (part of the NYT’s 1619 Project marking 400 years of American slavery).At the Washington Post, read an excerpt from The Condemnation of Blackness on racism as a primary reason that efforts to enforce police accountability have repeatedly foundered.On WBUR (Boston, MA)’s Radio Boston, listen to Muhammad discuss race and policing in America from a historical perspective.On the Project Syndicate podcast Opinion Has It, listen to Muhammad discuss George Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police as a tipping point for the United States.Read a New Yorker exploration, informed by Muhammad’s research, of the origins of modern American policing in American slavery and Jim Crow–era oppression.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, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”? 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. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.įollowing 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. Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. “ brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”-Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books

On the NPR podcast Throughline, listen to Khalil Gibran Muhammad explicate the parallel development of policing in America’s north and south-which in both regions hinged on the use of brutal force to control Black Americans:

Khalil muhammad the condemnation of blackness