The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. By Khalil Gibran Muhammad. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. xii, 380 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-674-03597-3.)

This important book bridges a scholarly gap between studies of racial disparities in arrest and incarceration in the contemporary United States and historical examinations of race and punishment in the Jim Crow South. While the existing literature emphasizes conservative backlashes following Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, Khalil Gibran Muhammad examines how white and black progressives forged a lasting association between race and crime in the urban North. He argues that progressives challenged the social Darwinist explanations given for high crime rates in African American and immigrant communities, using newly available statistical data to reveal the social and economic sources of criminal activity and urging local officials to address those roots through...