The Condemnation of Blackness

“At the dawn of the twentieth century, in a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, and demographically shifting America, blackness was refashioned through crime statistics. It became a more stable racial category in opposition to whiteness through racial criminalization. […] This book asks, how did European immigrants—the Irish and the Italians and the Polish, for example—gradually shed their criminal identities while blacks did not? In other words, how did criminality go from plural to singular?”

At this point in his introduction, Muhammad describes one of the primary functions of his book. With The Criminality of Blackness, he explores the America’s efforts to create—and erase - ties between race and crime, and how Blackness was systemically conflated with crime through statistical methods. From 1890-1940, Blackness was held up against crime statistics, with arrest data purposefully noting the race of Black criminals. Simultaneously, whiteness was erased from national crime data as criminal justice reforms eradicated immigration status and nationality from statistics. Muhammad argues such reforms and continued emphases on Black crime effectively rendered American criminality as a singularly Black act.

“But in many instances, northern white progressives neglected to think systemically about black people as one more struggling group like Italians, Russians, Jews, or poor native whites who needed their help. Consequently, whether by choice or unwittingly, many northern white progressives failed to act proactively on blacks’ behalf. […] many northern sociologists had pro-southern sympathies, according to historical sociologist John Stanfield, and ‘rarely inquired into black life mainly because they assumed that blacks were the South’s problem.’ Many of them also believed that northern blacks were the primary source of their own problems.”

A major component of Muhammad’s work is arguing the crucial role the urban North played in race relations and Black oppression seen in the 19th-20th centuries. Revising dominant historical understandings of a distinct ideological split between the North and the South, Muhammad draws readers’ attention to the fact that whites in both regions shared many commonalities when it came to race relations. In Chapter 1, he points out that Northern progressives did not view Black issues with equal concern as they did with issues in immigrant communities. Northern progressives believed issues of the Black community could only be solved by Black Americans, and thus cast a blind eye towards helping them in any meaningful way

“The new social scientific imperative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to save the nation by measuring black inferiority through any sign of African Americans’ failure to dominate or to lead or even to survive in modern society. These new scholars hoped that post-emancipatory demographic reports, with their tallies of births, deaths, morbidity, and prisoners, would prove to be key indicators of black fitness or lack thereof.”

In Chapter 1, Muhammad details the major shift in methodology that white supremacists used to argue Black inferiority. Whereas they once relied on anecdotal evidence to justify the racist power structure, Black emancipation pressured white supremacists to invent a new method. Burgeoning social sciences of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with their statistical methods of social analyses, attracted white supremacists. Fields like sociology and anthropology provided white supremacist scholars a way to analyze crime statistics and social data through a racialized lens with the mission to prove Black inferiority.

“With the ascendance of ‘statistical Anglo-Saxonism’ at the ‘fore of the human sciences’ and reform in the 1890s, abstract ideas of universal suffrage and abstract principles of equality, which had proven false and dangerous in the catastrophe that was Reconstruction, would no longer shape the future of race relations. Statistical data on the absolute and relative growth of the black prison population in the 1890 census, for example, would now be analyzed and interpreted as definitive proof of blacks’ true criminal nature. Such empirical evidence could then justify a range of discriminatory laws, first targeting blacks, then punishing them more harshly than whites.”

As social sciences became increasingly popular amongst white supremacist intellectuals, a “statistical Anglo-Saxon” movement emerged in late 19th-century America. This movement rejected abstract, subjective notions of equality in favor of the social sciences’ supposedly objective statistical methodology. New crime data, such as those provided by the 1890 census, were taken by statistical Anglo-Saxonists and used to construct and justify new methods of racial oppression. This movement targeted Black Americans to ensure the survival of the white supremacist power structure following Black emancipation.

“Ultimately, by framing black criminality as a key measure of black inferiority in the same way that his peers and predecessors had done through anatomical measurements and mortality data, Hoffman wrote crime into race and centered it at the heart of the Negro problem. In Race Traits Hoffman brilliantly tied black criminality to a repudiation of abolitionists’ and neo-abolitionists’ claims that with freedom, education, and moral training blacks would gradually achieve equality with whites. […] Not only did Hoffman state that education and religion were a waste of time and money, but he also implied that they were harmful to the goals of racial uplift.”

Muhammad’s analysis of Frederick L. Hoffman’s work is a key component in Part 1 of The Condemnation of Blackness. Hoffman lead the charge of Black criminality in his book Race Traits. Hoffman wrote crime into race and pinpointed Black criminality as the essential issue at the heart of American race relations. Using statistical analysis to reinforce his thesis that Black Americans had a biological propensity for vice and crime, Hoffman rejected abolitionist claims that Black Americans could ever achieve equality. He argued that Black inferiority was so obvious and apparent that any effort to educate or uplift the Black community was detrimental to American race relations. Muhammad refers to Hoffman’s thesis as “brilliantly” constructed because it articulated white supremacist ideas using scholarly, “objective” methods that framed Hoffman’s racist opinions as fact.

“Hall’s racialized vision of crime prevention—a call for a separate solution to crime among blacks—was emblematic of how the idea of black criminality shaped the thinking of many white reformers, including neo-abolitionists and progressives, in this era. White criminality was society’s problem, but black criminality was black people’s problem. Such thinking contributed to social work approaches and crime-fighting policies in black communities, with devastating consequences, including the worsening of social conditions.”

Here Muhammad is describing how social science theories of the 19th century—such as sociologist G. Stanley’s Hall’s vision of racialized crime solutions in 1887—set the stage for the characteristics of racial liberalism and white allyship in the 20th century. White reformers, progressives, and neo-abolitionists agreed with Hall’s assessment that issues in Black communities could not (and more importantly, should not) be solved by white Americans. Muhammad emphasizes the real-life implications of this ideology by arguing that it justified the enforcement of a color line in crime prevention and social aid. Black communities’ conditions worsened significantly because of these arguments that systemic aid should be given to white communities but could not be afforded to Black neighborhoods.

“Many white race-relations writers hoped to blaze a research trail to solve the Negro Problem by writing crime into race. In the process, they also hoped to save the nation by using black criminality as a rhetorical bridge to heal deep sectional divisions and distrust rooted in the postbellum era. These writers saw vital racial statistics as a pathway to certainty and serenity.”

Muhammad argues that Black criminality was embraced by white supremacist race scholars as a tool for national reconciliation following the Civil War. Postbellum America was fractured along regional lines, with both North and South distrusting one another after the violent, costly war. Many white intellectuals saw Black criminality as a unifying tool whereby North and South could unite under the common threat of Black freedom and the wave of vice and crime that emancipation was going to cause the entire country. Modern statistics, beginning with the 1890 census, proved as a route of unification for white America to work together and ensure the survival of white supremacy (and thus, continue Black oppression).

“Between 1896 and the beginning of the Great Migration, writing crime into race had become more than the sum of white and black writers’ data, discussion, and debate. Race-relations writers had inscribed criminality onto nearly every aspect of black people’s existence. That crime became linked to migration, to education, to politics, to housing, and to philanthropy reveals the pervasive influence of those who had forced the question to the nation of whether African Americans should continue to have access to social resources at all.”

Part 2 of The Condemnation of Blackness begins to investigate the systemic ramifications that came to pass in the 20th century after the race scholarship and creation of Black criminality in the late 19th century. As Muhammad notes, the ideology of Black criminality had grown past the confines of academia at the beginning of the early 20th century. It soon began to have real-life effects on Black communities in the urban north. Northern cities embraced Black criminality and used the ideology to justify withholding social aid and resources from Black communities. The image of Black Americans as inherently criminal effected nearly every facet of Black life, including the ability to move, get an education, and secure quality housing.

“Because the bugaboo of statistical disproportion now framed crime among blacks as excessive and unnatural, and most significantly as a reflection of the fundamental difference between blacks and whites, sympathetic writers like Boas, Kellor, Ovington, and Addams turned to culture rather than biology to account for the difference. Because these racial liberals truly believed that most blacks were indeed culturally inferior to most whites, they did not shrink from incriminating black culture, even as they passionately rejected […] biological determinism.”

Chapter 3 explores the rise of the racial liberal movement in the early 20th century. These white progressives tried to work as allies to Black Americans. However, as Muhammad points out, the ideology of Black criminality was so pervasive that it tainted the work of progressives as well. While they did not believe in biological explanations of Black inferiority, they did believe that Black Americans were culturally inferior. Muhammad notes that this was the essential hypocrisy of 20th-century racial liberals in the urban North. Even as they combatted biological racism, they encouraged cultural racism.

“From the opening of the Progressive era to its waning days on the eve of World War I and the Great Migration, black criminality had become not just a universal tool to measure black fitness for citizenship; it was also a tool to shield, to varying degrees, white Americans from the charge of racism, helping to determine the degree to which whites had any responsibility to help black people.”

Muhammad argues that from 1900-1914, Black criminality was no longer just a tool for white supremacists to argue that Black citizens were unfit for modern American society. Rather, it had expanded into a tool for all white Americans to justify and shield their racism. Racial liberals’ new cultural analyses of Black inferiority allowed those in power to argue that only Black people could solve their community’s issues. It thus allowed them to deny social aid to Black communities while avoiding charges of racism.

“One of the lessons learned during the Progressive era was that on the white-side of the color line compassion was crucial to reform. It was a central theme in the work of muckraking journalists, liberal social scientists, and sympathetic settlement workers as they pooled their talents and fought against the ravages of economic, social, and political inequality in the industrial age. Because of the crisis of white crime and immorality in the urban North, these compassionate men and women called for citywide help and financial support. […] African American researchers and reformers during the Progressive era might have been known as progressive leaders in their own right had they had the resources and influence of their white peers.”

The color line in the urban North is one of the main themes of The Condemnation of Blackness. Muhammad gives one example of the color line here regarding the attention afforded to groups in need and access to resources. He describes that on the white side of the color line, compassion towards the white and immigrant poor was a focus of white reformers. White progressives lead a charge that demanded systemic aid be afforded to these communities. They had the power and influence to secure this social and economic aid for the white needy. For Black Americans, however, there was a different reality. Black communities were ignored by white reformers, and further, Black reformers were ignored by the system and denied the access to aid that was given to white reformers. With this example, Muhammad illustrates the how systemic treatments of reformers and communities in need differed along a color line.

“[To many] racialist writers of the post-Reconstruction period, crime had become a defining characteristic of the Negro Problem. Southerners used crime to justify disenfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation; northerners used it to justify municipal neglect, joblessness, and residential segregation. To an extent, race and crime experts at the national level were blind to the complexities of local causes and conditions. […] many nationally recognized experts did not live among the people they studied. Instead, they relied heavily on Census Bureau statistics and recycled data from local experts that supported their interpretations.”

In this quote, Muhammad situates his analysis of Black criminality within a larger historical trajectory. He relates Black criminality to post-Reconstruction debates and argues that Black criminality became a key component to how whites viewed the issue of integrating formerly enslaved Black Americans into free society. The equating of Blackness with criminality allowed white Americans in both the North and South to justify racist policies and violence. Muhammad points out that race researchers who disseminated the ideology of Black criminality were out of touch with the local realities of the urban North. Instead of understanding the people that their work impacted, many national race researchers merely sought out data that reinforced ideas of Black criminality.

“The social workers and probation officers in the midst of the daily grind of crime prevention within settlements like the FNG may not have seen their good works as the building blocks of white privilege. Righting the wrongs of troubled teens by showing them that playing by the rules might lead them all the way to the White House was no minor demonstration of their humanity and worth as future law-abiding citizens. The message was that the sky was the limit. The same could hardly be said for African Americans, whether at-risk youths or the most respected black man in America.”

Muhammad explains how seemingly innocuous social programs (such as Philadelphia’s Friends Neighborhood Guild) reinforced differences in crime fighting resources along racial lines. Most progressive social programs limited their aid to white and immigrant communities. Muhammad argues that their neglect of Black communities, coupled with their simultaneous uplift of the white and immigrant poor, constituted the systemic foundations for white privilege. While white social programs like the FNG had the resources and influence to bring their constituency on field trips to the White House, Black progressive leaders struggled to gain any access to systemic aid to help their communities of color.

“At the Lincoln Conference, in addition to the problem of employment discrimination, Stemons also addressed Wharton’s main concern that northern blacks were being abandoned or neglected by social service agencies. Stemons saw this problem in a broader context. He argued that the North and South had joined ‘upon a policy of submerging the race’ based on the widespread belief that ‘the Negro must work out his own salvation.’”

Muhammad establishes how Black community leader James Stemons worked in relation to his peers to create new solutions for Black Americans and push the boundaries of Black scholarship. His speech at the Lincoln Conference in 1909 interacted with Du Bois’s famous term of the “submerged tenth” (used to describe the section of the Black community in most dire need) to argue for a systemic “submersion” (read: oppression) of the entire Black race. Muhammad also frames Stemons in relation to Wharton’s thesis of northern Black abandonment to show how Stemons pushed this argument to a larger national scale. Muhammad’s framing and analysis of Stemons illustrates how he was one of the first to assert the existence of a systemic problem for Black Americans.

“For black writers and reformers, then, highlighting black criminality was a double-edged sword. At the same time that it carved out space to create a dialogue with liberal whites about racism’s consequences and middle-class blacks about their duty to the race, it defended the conservative self-help solution that dominated the pace of racial reform before […] 1915 and the onset of the Great Migration.”

Muhammad describes Black efforts to critique Black criminality as a “double-edged sword” that cut both ways. Black scholars’ research on Black criminality gave white liberals a vital perspective on relationships between race and crime. At the same time, these conversations often resulted in conservative conclusions, where Black and white race reformers agreed that Black communities could only help themselves from within through means of self-improvement.

“A major concern expressed by African Americans such as Du Bois, Stemons, and writers for the Philadelphia Tribune was that crime prevention among blacks had been too long ignored. There was also a booming body of evidence that anticrime forces that did descend on black communities acted with impunity and disregarded the individual rights of black citizens. In this thicket of paradoxical worries, blacks themselves contributed to the racialization of crime prevention by linking racial progress to crime fighting.”

Part 3 explores how the color line effected crime fighting and prevention in Black communities. Black crime fighters in the early-to-mid 20th century faced a paradoxical issue when it came to this issue. While the color line was preventing Black communities from receiving an equal share of crime fighting resources, in the rare times when these resources were afforded, police and vice raids acted with impunity and brute force, violating Black rights. Black communities thus simultaneously received crime fighting attention that was both too little and too aggressive. Muhammad argues that Black intellectuals’ efforts to shed light on this paradox only made the issue more complex. Their arguments of a color line in crime prevention perpetuated the linking between Black progress and fighting crime in Black communities.

“In a context where crime fighting had become the mantra of the city’s new reform mayor, whites looked after their own. The problem for black crime fighters was that saving their own meant working largely without the active support of the police, major city institutions, and influential politicians. The ultimate irrelevance of Stemons’s League for Civic and Political Reform is a perfect case in point. The LCPR’s program was basically identical to what white religious organizations and reformers were able to accomplish […], but Mayor Blankenburg gave it no support, and the LCPR was thus unsuccessful.”

Chapter 5 looks specifically at the color line that existed in Philadelphia’s crime fighting programs in the early 20th century. Muhammad uses James Stemons’s LCPR as an example illustrating the color line at work. Whereas white reformers and crime fighters had the backing of Mayor Blankenburg and all of the resources that came with such support, Black crime fighters had to go without. Often, this lack of systemic support led to the failure of Black crime fighting efforts. The failure of the LCPR shows the stark divide in the attention and concern paid to white versus Black communities in the 20th-century urban North.

“The stigma of black criminality that in part defined the Negro Problem at the onset of the Progressive era was reinforced at the end of the period by the failure of white politicians and moral reformers to prioritize crime prevention among blacks as they had for whites. Because Progressive era moral reform was racially stratified and discriminatory, black criminality continued to be perceived as a racial problem and a reflection of black inferiority.”

Muhammad explains the consequences of Philadelphia’s crime fighting color line. Just as Black criminality became inexorably linked to the Negro Problem at the beginning of the Progressive era, the ideology had survived through the end of the era into the mid-20th century. Indeed, Black criminality had grown even more nuanced and pervasive. Muhammad observes that white politicians and reformers had essentially institutionalized Black criminality by writing the ideology into how they fought crime. White reformers fought crime and vice in white and immigrant neighborhoods, but they neglected Black communities. By enforcing a color line in crime prevention, white reformers kept Black neighborhoods shrouded in crime while white/immigrant neighborhoods were “cleaned up.” This reinforced beliefs that crime was a specifically Black issue.

“Although not in the way that many had argued, black criminality did lie beneath the battle over housing, of which the riots were the most violent manifestation. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the issue of residential segregation in the North relied in part on the powerful racial imagery of black criminals. Real and false evidence of black crime, such as stories in daily newspapers, reinforced the idea of blacks as a dangerous threat to white communities.”

With Chapter 5’s investigation into the racial violence of the early 20th century, Muhammad supports his thesis that the urban North criminalized race and played an important role in constructing systemic racism. Chapter 5 argues that Black demands for better housing was a trigger of the racial violence and riots that occurred in the 1910s. Muhammad further elevates his argument by tying Black criminality to the violence. He asserts that Black criminality marginalized Black Americans, rendering them as a frightening “Other” that white Americans could project negative qualities onto. Muhammad points to the newspapers as one example of how Black Americans were widely villainized by whites. These popular stereotypes directly affected the lives of Black Americans, making it difficult for them to secure jobs and housing.

“In the 1920s a larger cohort of academically trained black reformers and local activists responded to this new era of racial conservatives by taking a greater role in the policing of white racism within black communities in the urban North. […] Moving to the center of this intensification of antiracist activities among black reformers was a focus on racism in the criminal justice system, particularly in its most explicit forms. Clear and preponderant new evidence showed African American criminality, for example, to be a direct consequence of discriminatory policing.”

Chapter 6 marks an important turn in The Condemnation of Blackness’ larger theme of evolving Black scholarship and resistance. The racial violence of the 1910s inspired a new generation of more militant Black intellectuals in the 1920s. This new generation pushed the boundaries of Black anti-racist action. Directly interacting with the research of their predecessors, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Stemons, Black reformers in the 1920s used statistics and social science research to argue that Black criminality was not a racial issue, but a policing issue. The 1920s thus represented a remarkable turn in Black scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries, where scholars began arguing that racism was a pervasive, systemic issue.

“Since the 1890s, disproportionately high crime rates among blacks had been the starting point and linchpin of modern discourse on black criminality. […] In the world of numbers stripped of context, all black people were more likely to commit crimes against property and personhood. But context was everything for those writing in defense of blacks’ humanity.”

Muhammad succinctly describes the issues of relying on statistics as purely objective reflections of human dynamics. A proper reading of social statistics necessitates that one read them through the proper context (e.g., discriminatory policing methods in relation to high Black arrest rates). However, Muhammad argues that the race discourse of the 19th and 20th centuries was dominated by statistical analyses that were entirely stripped of context. The lack of context allowed conservative and liberal race researchers to use racial statistics as proof of Black inferiority. The history told in The Condemnation of Blackness thus reveals the danger of relying on statistics to always reflect an objective truth.

“The system was overburdened by the fact that the number of violations within the entire population exceeded those that could be prosecuted. ‘Informal standards’ were thus developed to help guide police work, resulting in a wide departure ‘from the impartial, due process model that was written into law and supported by civic reformers.’ In this regard, blacks were the easiest targets of the police; their rights were the least respected, and they had only a modicum of political influence to hold officers accountable.”

One of Muhammad’s last topics of analysis is how discriminatory policing expressed itself on a systemic scale. In this quote, he explains how police were overburdened with crime in the urban North of the early 20th century. Subsequently, they were allowed to operate outside of the rules of due process that protected Americans’ civil rights. Muhammad asserts that Black Americans bore the brunt of this police discrimination because they did not have the power to protect themselves. This then led to higher arrest rates of Black Americans, feeding directly into ideas of Black criminality.

“The nation’s first comprehensive data system, authoritative to this day, was not an unqualified success. The results were especially mixed regarding African American criminal justice experiences and their measurement. Standardized ‘reliable’ statistics—properly recorded and tabulated—did not change the daily reality of racial bias among police officers.”

By the end of the 1920s with the failure of Prohibition, America’s criminal justice system underwent vast reform. A new, uniform data system was implemented nationwide to ensure consistent records and crime statistics. However, even with these vast reforms, the system still left Black Americans behind. The uniform system failed to reflect the social reality of discriminatory policing—the very reason for higher Black crime rates. Importantly, Muhammad notes that this same data system is still relied upon in the United States today.