In Black America

In Black America Podcast: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America – Part II

October 28, 2012 11:46 am by: John Hanson

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. presents his second, and final, discussion with Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could...
» read more