Abstract
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 392 pp.: 9780674035973, $38.50 cloth, $ 18.95 pbk
The conventional view of the political origins of mass incarceration in the United States is that the 1960s escalation in crime rates prompted national leaders to exploit the issue of street crime. This provided an opening for the Republican Party, beginning with Barry Goldwater in 1964, to undermine the New Deal liberal coalition by making appeals to law and order that were really coded racial appeals to disaffected white voters. Analytical attention on the role of political elites in mass incarceration has thus tended to center on how leading white politicians sought to refashion their political bases in the wake of the seismic political shifts set in motion by the civil rights movement by invoking the law-and-order card, which was really a thinly veiled race card.
More recent research provides a more nuanced account of how racial politics got funneled through criminal justice policies. Politicians so readily identified today as penal hard-liners, like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and even segregationist Lester Maddox of Georgia, did not immediately march in lock step toward the prison and the execution chamber after Goldwater denounced the ‘growing menace’ to personal safety in his electrifying speech before the Republican convention in 1964 (Gottschalk, 2006: 10, 213–224, 234). Nor did these public officials single-handedly impose the carceral state. It now appears that the construction of the carceral state was a deeply bipartisan project from early on. Conservative congressional Democrats in the South began strategically wielding the street crime issue in the 1950s, well before crime rates began to escalate and leading Republicans took up the charge.
Southern conservatives initially cast their opposition to major civil rights legislation in criminological terms, arguing that ‘integration breeds crime’ (Murakawa, 2005: 81–82). As riots broke out in major cities across the country in the mid-to-late 1960s, they reformulated the connection between civil rights and crime, working ‘vociferously to conflate crime and disobedience, with its obvious extensions to civil rights’ (Weaver, 2007: 250). Many urban white voters in the North initially maintained a delicate balancing act on the civil rights issue. Although they opposed racial integration at the local level, they supported national candidates who were pro-civil rights. This split political personality became less tenable as crime and disorder ‘became the fulcrum points at which the local and national intersected’, thus weakening the New Deal coalition (Flamm, 2007: 10; Thompson, 2010).
A new wave of historians is pushing the origins of the modern law-and-order era back even further in time. Some of this new historical work also shifts the focus from the South to the North and identifies the key role that black southern migrants to urban centers in the North played as political actors, political symbols, and political foils in the politics of crime and punishment (see, for example, McLennan, 2008; Murch, 2010).
In his magisterial study of what he calls the ‘biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America’ (p. 1), Khalil Gibran Muhammad underscores how the Progressive era was a formative one. He provocatively challenges the conventional wisdom that the racist Jim Crow South was the primary cauldron of racial criminalization that laid the foundation for the modern law-and-order era launched in the 1960s that gave birth to the carceral state. Muhammad artfully shows how academics, journalists, politicians, and public figures located primarily in the North refashioned blackness through crime statistics, such that ‘white criminality gradually lost its fearsomeness’ as Irish, Italian, Polish, and other white immigrant groups were ‘able to shed their criminal identities’ (p. 5), but blacks were not. The apotheosis of this refashioning of white criminality was the Government’s gradual removal of the ‘Foreign Born’ category from the Uniform Crime Reports, the national repository of crime statistics, such that by the early 1940s, ‘“Black” stood as the unmitigated signifier of deviation (and deviance) from the normative category of “White”’ (p. 13).
During the Progressive era, the gap between white supremacist writers and white Progressives ‘narrowed significantly when it came to discussing black crime, vice, and immorality’ (p. 8). White social scientists, activists, and public figures like Jane Addams sympathetically portrayed white criminals as victims of industrialization. They viewed them as a ‘great army of unfortunates’ who were ‘juxtaposed against an army of self-destructive and pathological blacks’ (p. 8). A key and enduring legacy of Progressive era social reformers was to sever any sense that the fate of black people was linked to the fate of poor whites and urban immigrants (p. 103).
A ‘hopeful vision of white criminality’ (p. 98) took root, according to Muhammad. It was premised on the view that white criminality was largely a symptom of industrial capitalism and urban life and thus could be ameliorated though greater public and private investment in education, social services, social programs, and public infrastructure. By contrast, in the immediate decades after the release of the 1890 census, which riveted public attention for the first time on the disproportionate number of blacks in US prisons (especially northern prisons), the absolute and relative growth of the black prison population was ‘analyzed and interpreted as definitive proof of blacks’ true criminal nature’ (p. 34). The findings of the 1890 census were used to justify many discriminatory laws that targeted blacks and treated them more harshly than whites. Blacks were increasingly viewed as heralding from an inferior culture, one so scarred by centuries of slavery that government intervention would be of little help until blacks uplifted their own race on their own. If not, they risked dying out as a race. In short, white criminality was considered society’s problem but black criminality was considered blacks’ problem (p. 76).
Muhammad artfully excavates the varied and changing set of claims about black criminality that were constructed from the late 19th century to the Second World War era. Black and white social scientists, social reformers, journalists, antiracist activists, law enforcement officials, and politicians celebrated and hotly contested these claims. The first generation of academically trained black social workers and researchers challenged the contention that the 1890 census figures on the racial composition of state prisons were definitive proof that blacks were significantly more criminogenic. But their research had relatively little impact on the wider public understanding of the relationship between race, culture, and crime until about 1928, when Thomas Sellin called into question the dominant thrust of nearly four decades of research on black criminality. Sellin argued that African-Americans were being unfairly stigmatized by misinterpretations of the prison census data, as well as by the glaring limitations of the existing research on crime and punishment.
Sellin’s claims fell on more receptive ears, according to Muhammad, because he was one of the nation’s most respected white sociologists. Moreover, the widespread racial violence that erupted in the North in the 1920s in the wake of the first phase of the Great Migration had focused public attention on white police officers’ complicity in the violence and on police corruption and brutality more generally. Furthermore, a second generation of black scholars and social workers was documenting how police, prosecutors, the courts, and prison officials treated blacks disparately in the criminal justice system, which helped to explain why blacks were disproportionately arrested and imprisoned.
Muhammad pointedly focuses on the critical role of black elites in the racialization of crime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many black elites, including WEB DuBois, often ‘embraced Victorian ideals of morality and respectability’ to distinguish themselves from the ‘uncouth’ and ‘criminally inclined’ poor blacks, especially recent migrants from the South, and emphasized the need for self-improvement (pp. 9–10, 67–70). But many black reformers also simultaneously or alternately singled out structural factors, including but not limited to white racism, to explain black criminality. Furthermore, they challenged claims that disproportionate arrest and imprisonment rates accurately reflected the degree of differential offending between blacks and whites. Then, as now, this was treacherous political ground. ‘By debating the meaning of high versus low criminality or increasing versus decreasing crime rates, black writers unwittingly reinforced the importance of crime in defining black life’, explains Muhammad (p. 93).
Muhammad’s detailed and nuanced analysis of shifts in the racialization of crime over the course of the first half of the 20th century shows how broad claims about racism driving penal policy do not tell us much on their own. Such claims do not illuminate how and why specific penal policies, law enforcement tactics, and conceptions of criminality prevail at a given moment and who or what brought about their demise. Furthermore, such broad claims tend to direct much of the analytical attention to the role of whites in the construction of penal policy and away from that of blacks and other racial and ethnic groups. Muhammad illuminates the difficult and often impossible terrain that black elites and other blacks have had to navigate on the issue of race and criminality. He illustrates how at times, black elites have been self-serving and moralizing as they have sought to preserve their privileged status as gatekeepers of the race by castigating poor blacks for their alleged cultural pathologies. When they have raised specific structural issues to explain differential criminality, it has not been an easy hill to climb. Any call to address the structural roots of differential offending between blacks and whites draws attention to those very differences, thus giving ammunition to conservative whites and others who blame black culture for the pathologies of black criminality.