56 pages • 1-hour read
The Condemnation of Blackness
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Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Introduction Summary
Author Khalil Gibran Muhammad opens by describing The Condemnation of Blackness as a biography of the role that Black criminality played in the making of modern American cities. The term “Black criminality” refers to how crime came to be conflated with Blackness in post-slavery America. This conflation was built by relying on purportedly “objective” crime statistics that emphasized “Black crimes” while erasing white ones.
Muhammad focuses on the period between 1890 and 1940, and he explains his wish to answer how and why racial crime statistics become the center of public discourse in the United States. These racial statistics caused crime to be inexorably linked to Blackness. His thesis is that “racial inferiority and crime became fastened to African Americans by contrast to ideas of class and crime that shaped views of European immigrants and working-class whites” (6).
Muhammad marks the Progressive Era as a key historical moment that established the framework for Black criminality. For instance, the 1890 census relied on raw data that highlighted the disproportionate incarceration rates of Black Americans without taking into consideration the discriminatory policing and legal practices that led to such imprisonment. Presented as objective and irrefutable, this incomplete data provides the foundation for Black criminalization for centuries to come.
Another concern of The Condemnation of Blackness is answering how and why this idea of Black criminality has had such staying power in American politics and society. Muhammad argues that this is not simply the fault of the Jim Crow South and conservative politicians; urban areas in the North and white liberals were equally at fault. He points to the “racial liberal” movement as an example of this dynamic. While racial liberals argued against the dominant image of Black Americans as biologically inferior, they argued that Black American culture contributed to Black criminality. Thus, while attempting to work as allies, white racial liberals only fueled the Black crime stereotype further. As a result of such dynamics, Muhammad focuses on the urban North, interrogating a history that few have looked at before.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 begins with reviewing the work of 19th-century scientist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. He wrote extensively on the “Negro Problem,” a term coined by scholars after the Civil War which referred to white anxieties over how freed Black people would integrate into American society. Muhammad argues that Shaler’s articles are representative of the debates over race, politics, and society in the United States after the Civil War.
Scholars’ obsessive impulse to prove Black inferiority began in the 1860s as Americans were faced with the reality of emancipation. Emancipation presented a jarring new society for white Americans which triggered an anxious wave of “scientific” research that argued it would be impossible for Black citizens to succeed in American society because they were an inferior, criminal race.
Muhammad notes that in the first half of the 19th century, the theory of Black inferiority was based on anecdotal information such as accounts of traveling to Africa, state slave laws, and Enlightenment-era philosophy. Moving into the latter half of the century, scholars wanted to provide firm proof to bolster the claims that Black Americans could not function in society. This led to the rise of race science, a movement that involved scientists, physicians, and biologists who studied the human body in search of verifiable proof of white superiority and Black inferiority.
By the 1880s, however, no objective, scientific proof of a racial hierarchy emerged. However, emergent social sciences (e.g., anthropology, sociology, and political science) became new fields of study that worked to establish Black inferiority. Race science thus gave way to social Darwinism, where social scientists and scholars in the humanities took Darwin’s natural selection and applied it within a social context. Here, economic, political, and social power
came to be seen as a natural consequence of [a] group’s inherent superiority. Inequality based on exploitation, coercion, duplicity, and genocide were subsumed within an understanding that the oppressed were dominated because of their own inherent weaknesses (24).
All of these scholarly efforts to prove Black inferiority culminated in 1890 as intellectuals collectively turned to the findings of that year’s census. Muhammad explains that the 1890 census was an especially important milestone because it was 25 years after the Civil War and would be the first census that could answer the question of how Black Americans were faring in a post-slavery society. Its findings, which included a declining Black population and disproportionate rates of incarceration for Black citizens, were weaponized by white supremacists as “objective” evidence of Black peoples’ incapability of succeeding in a modern society.
The 1890 census provided a new methodology in arguing for Black inferiority: statistical data. Muhammad concludes his chapter by asserting that this new emergence of racial data in the late 19th century set the stage for white Americans’ reliance on empirical evidence to justify racism and Black criminality moving into the 20th century.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 follows the evolution of race relations scholarship from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. Muhammad establishes how the institutionalization of racial crime statistics in published research came about.
The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the work of Frederick L. Hoffman, whose 1896 work Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro was a cornerstone study in establishing racial statistics as a new norm in race research. Hoffman was a German immigrant who came to the United States in 1884. He traveled throughout the country and observed race relations in both the North and South before beginning his work in statistics and becoming a published author. Studying Northern cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, his work rested on the dominant misconception that the North was free from any of the racist oppression that characterized the South. He argued that because Black Americans were disproportionately incarcerated in both the North and the South, it could not be due to systemic oppression. Rather, crime statistics proved Black criminality. He also relied on high Black mortality rates to argue that Black Americans were inherently weaker and inferior.
Some scholars combatted Hoffman’s thesis. M. V. Ball, a white doctor working in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, insisted that material conditions (e.g. childhood poverty, poor hygiene, unsanitary and close living quarters) were at the root of high Black mortality rates. There was also a class of Black scholars who dismantled arguments of Black criminality. Ida B. Wells is an example of special note because she used Hoffman’s methodology of statistics to criticize popular racist ideologies. She argued that racist conceptions of Blackness rested on hypocritical foundations, and she showed that the rape of Black women by white men was far more common than the rape of white women by Black men (which was often the justification for lynching). Wells’s research was complimented by the work of scholars like W. E. B. DuBois and Kelly Miller, both of whom were Black men who dissected Hoffman’s work to argue against his racist thesis.
Muhammad points out that there were also Black scholars who catered to the dominant white supremacist attitudes of the time. Here, he largely focuses on William Hannibal Thomas and his 1901 book The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. In this work, Thomas argued that the “list of negative qualities of Negroes seemed limitless” and agreed with those like Hoffman who asserted that Black Americans were an “intrinsically inferior type of humanity” (79). Thomas, like Hoffman, was praised by some for being objective and truthful. His work was embraced by some white scholars because it was “unsentimental” and advanced their racist ideology instead of combatting it.
Chapter 2 ends by drawing attention back to Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Decades after his own research, Shaler observed the evolving racial discourse and emerging uses of statistics in the research of those such as Hoffman, Wells, and DuBois. He then insisted that white racial liberals in the North needed to advocate for racial reform to improve relations across the country.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 2 Analysis
Part 1 of The Condemnation of Blackness establishes Muhammad’s thesis argument and methodology. It also provides the historical and theoretical foundations for the theory of Black criminality, allowing readers to fully understand the concept before Muhammad launches into the main thrust of his research in Parts 2 and 3. Part 1 relies heavily on close comparative analyses of the work of prominent race scholars from the late 19th century into the first few years of the 20th century. This analysis of sources allows Muhammad to establish how Black criminality was constructed and to argue how the research of this time set the stage for Black criminalization in the urban North later in the 20th century.
Muhammad is writing a revisionist history. A revisionist history is when scholars research a topic that has been written on by others and reinterprets or revises the dominant perspective. Muhammad’s research into Black criminality cast its eyes on previously-explored topics—i.e., American race relations in late 19th to early 20th centuries—and offers a corrective to past scholars’ views.
In his introduction, Muhammad argues that the socio-political atmosphere of postbellum America—particularly in its Northern cities—led to the creation of “Black criminality,” the idea that Black Americans are inherently inferior, and this causes them to commit crimes at a much larger rate than white peers. Contributing factors that led to the construction of Black criminality were white anxieties over the “Negro Problem,” mass Southern Black migrations to the North, and new social science research that relied on incomplete analyses of racial statistics.
One way in which Muhammad revises previous scholarship is by focusing on regionality. By arguing that Northern cities played an important role in constructing and perpetuating ideas of Black criminality, Muhammad critiques one of the most pervasive misunderstandings when it comes to region and race in America. American historians often cast the South as a region of racism and the North (particularly, Northern cities) as a region of justice. As Muhammed argues in his introduction:
dominant historical narratives about black criminality before the 1960s have been told through southern criminal justice practices and framed as premodern […] In this literature, it is as if black criminality had not been shaped by modern ideas or modern agencies, or that very little happening in the urban North pertained to black experiences until the post-World War II era (5).
Muhammad wishes to dismantle and revise this popular binary of race and region in American history. His thesis purposefully emphasizes the urban North to shed light on the fact that Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York played incalculable roles in creating the national ideology of Black criminality. Thus, The Condemnation of Blackness revises the dominant idea existent in American history that the North was a beacon of fairness and equity for Black Americans.
Another way that Muhammad’s work establishes itself as a revisionist history is through its emphasis on crime statistics. He argues that statistics and their purported “objectivity” played an enormous and harmful role in race research of the late 19th and early 20th century. Indeed, Muhammad insists there is a very close link between region and statistics when it comes to the historical construction of Black criminality. He asserts, “Tracing the emergence and evolution of the statistical discourse on black criminality sheds new light on the urban North as a crucial site for the production of modern ideas about race, crime, and punishment” (4). Here, he pinpoints the function of his research’s methodology concerning region and statistics. The book’s most important revisionist aspect is its dual methodological focus of region and statistics. Both components work together to form Muhammad’s thesis arguing that analyzing statistical research from 1890 to 1940 reveals the harmful role the North played in conflating race with crime.
The source analysis in Part I illustrates this methodology at work. Muhammad’s close reading of various Northern scholars’ race research in Chapters 1 and 2 reveals how racial statistics emerged over the course of the late 19th century and grew in popularity into the early 20th. Chapters 1 and 2 work together to provide a narrative arc that explains Black criminality’s construction and growth in the immediate postbellum period. With his analyses of different scholars’ research, Muhammad establishes how researchers through the 19th and 20th centuries created a collective intellectual force that, together, reinforced Black criminality in the American consciousness.
Chapter 1 details the birth of Black criminality by tracking how race scholarship’s arguments and methodologies changed through time. Muhammad first briefly reviews the European race research methodology that scholars used to build dominant racist attitudes in the United States. White supremacist scholars in the first half of the 19th century largely relied on anecdotal evidence to support notions of Black inferiority. They used stories told by slaveowners, travel accounts, and racial pseudoscience to disseminate racist ideology. By contrast, the postbellum period saw race scholars itching for “scientific” proof of Black inferiority and searching for new research methods that could provide such proof. This urge was triggered by the “Negro Problem,” a term used in the 19th century to describe white Americans’ anxieties as they were forced to embrace the new reality of Black emancipation.
Muhammad grounds the 19th century’s evolution of American race scholarship by closely analyzing the research of Northern scholar Nathanial Southgate Shaler. Shaler’s research is used in Chapter 1 as the prime example of the new, modern methodology that emerged in race scholarship of the late 19th century. Muhammad illustrates how the urban North played an essential role in changing the course of race relations. Chapter 1 argues that Shaler was among the first race researchers to push for the use of social science and statistics to gain empirical proof of Black inferiority. In 1890, the year that the national census was released with data that would show how Black citizens had integrated into American society after emancipation, Shaler wrote an article on the importance of such data for the Boston magazine Atlantic Monthly. He insisted that statistics had the unique capacity to reflect Black Americans’ “true racial capacity,” making it possible “to found our conclusions on much surer ground” (33). One might note in Shaler’s language that he was not looking to statistics to reveal the truth so much as provide white supremacists with “objective” methods with which to argue Black inferiority. As Muhammad points out, the 1890 census that year detailed the disproportionately high incarceration rates for Black Americans. This data fed right into Shaler’s wishes for statistics that could provide the foundation for his white supremacism. In incorporating these direct quotes from Shaler and situating them amongst the larger historical narrative of Black inferiority, Muhammad reveals how supposedly neutral statistics and data were weaponized by white supremacists to perpetuate racist power structures.
Building off Chapter 1’s exploration of how the theory of Black criminality was born, Chapter 2 investigates how racial statistics were institutionalized as the new methodology to “prove” Black inferiority in postbellum America. This chapter showcases how Shaler’s groundbreaking implementation of racial statistics paved the way for Frederick L. Hoffman’s employment of this methodology. Muhammad points to Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro as the definitive work that cemented the relationship between racial statistics and Black criminality. Hoffman’s research employed the statistical methodology directly endorsed by Nathanial Shaler and set the stage for the debates over Black criminality that characterized the remainder of the 19th century and 20th century.
The supposed credibility of Hoffman’s thesis arguing that high Black incarceration rates were due to Black inferiority relied entirely on statistics. The crux of his argument was the fact that Black incarceration rates were just as high, if not higher, in the North than as in the South. Since the North was understood as the land of equality amongst white Americans, Hoffman’s logic followed that it could not be a discriminatory criminal justice system at fault for Black incarceration rates in the North. While Shaler had given white race scholars a methodology, Hoffman gave them the ultimate argument using this methodology. Most notably, the fact that Hoffman—a Northern scholar working in New Jersey—used the North’s reputation of equality as the lynchpin to his white supremacist argument is a strong piece of evidence supporting Muhammad’s own regional thesis arguing the importance of the urban North to constructing Black criminality. If Shaler effectively introduced statistical methodology to white supremacists seeking to prove Black inferiority, Hoffman proved exactly how powerful—and dangerous—this methodology was.
Muhammad’s analyses of Shaler, Hoffman, and the interrelation of their work illustrates the function and importance of Part 1 to the rest of The Condemnation of Blackness. With Part 1, Muhammad displays how the construction of Black criminality was a collective effort that saw scholars building from their peers’ methodologies and arguments to further hone and advance white supremacist ideologies.
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