“Dissects the origins of the myth of Black criminality, laying bare how consistently our past informs our present. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements. “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. “Explores how the myth of black criminality became deeply embedded in American thought and was important in the making of urban America.
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 role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work by historian Khalil Muhammad. ” -Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books “A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us. “A fresh and fierce study of one of the most enduring lies in American society: the deliberate statistical fusion of criminality with Blackness.
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