Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Book Reviews: American Politics
It is the rare piece of scholarship that invokes a feeling that our current moment is not so different from our racial past. Khalil Muhammad's book does exactly that. By describing in incredible depth the "ideological currency of black criminality" (p. 3) throughout the nation's history, the author provides readers with a new vision through the lens of the past.
The power of The Condemnation of Blackness is in giving contemporary debates--about Trayvon Martin, the black underclass, and the extraordinarily high rates of black contact with criminal justice--a fuller historical context. The book does not, as Michelle Alexander and other scholars do, argue that attention to black crime is the latest in the sordid saga of racial oppression. Instead, it concerns the vitality of the debates about black crime to the quest for racial equality across its inglorious history--and to a central construct in its major disappointments.
Muhammad argues that black criminality rhetoric is not just a trope but a long-standing ideology governing race relations and equality discourse. Forged in the Progressive era, black criminality became a mainstay of normative debates about the place of blacks in America. The author demonstrates that the linking of crime to race was one of the main pillars upholding racial inequality and an unwavering justification for not extending aid to black communities. At key moments in our nation's history, this focus on black crime helped both to define blackness and to maintain its racial pariah status.
Muhammad presents his readers with a fascinating history of the ways in which black crime discourse emerges and evolves and becomes central to questions over blacks' "fitness for citizenship." The main characters in the account are white and black intellectuals (W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Mary White Ovington are among...