Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

How did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism and justifying inequality. How was this statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged? Why was the same link not made for whites? In the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, under the shadow of Ferguson and Baltimore, no questions could be more urgent.

“The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work…[It] shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime…one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

“Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements.”
—New Yorker

"A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us." - New York Review of Books

"The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work by historian Khalil Muhammad. The book shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime almost immediately after Emancipation, one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice." - The Nation

"Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements." - New Yorker

"Explores how the myth of black criminality became deeply embedded in American thought and was important in the making of urban America." - Washington Post

"A fresh and fierce study of one of the most enduring lies in American society: the deliberate statistical fusion of criminality with Blackness." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"On the whole, Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness marks a tremendous contribution to scholarship on racism and reform in the Progressive era and will help point the way forward in ongoing conversations about crime, punishment, and representations of blackness in the United States. By weaving together the histories of scientific racism, migration, immigrant and African American uplift ideologies, racial violence, and sociopolitical change in the cauldron of the urban North, this text offers important insights into how ideas about race shaped urban life. As the nation continues to wrestle with disparities in its criminal justice system and the considerable consequences thereof, Muhammad’s work serves as a poignant reminder of how these inequalities were shaped and how deeply they reach back into the nation’s history." - Journal of African American Literature

"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." - Journal of American History

"Meticulous in its research and brilliant in its exposition, Khalil Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness addresses the contemporary crisis in criminal justice by examining its intellectual precedents in the decades after slavery." - Law, Culture, and the Humanities

"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’ 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." - Perspectives on Politics

"Dissects the origins of the myth of Black criminality, laying bare how consistently our past informs our present." - Fast Company