DR. KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD ON RACE, CRIME AND 'THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS' (2020 hits)
By Zarrin Ahmed, Staff Writer
Published: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Updated: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 23:04
Author and editor Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad shared his knowledge about the relationship between race and crime in a lecture titled, “The Condemnation of Blackness: The Past Meets the Present” on Tuesday evening.
Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Muhammad was formerly a professor of African American history at Indiana University and associate editor of The Journal of American History. He was recently appointed to the Editorial Board of “Transition Magazine,” published by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.
Muhammad is the great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, an African American religious leader who led the Nation of Islam, and the son of Ozier Muhammad, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times photographer.
Having graduated The University of Pennsylvania in 1993 with a degree in economics, Muhammad received his Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University in 2004. He is a member of the Delta Eta chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Before joining the faculty of Indiana University, he spent two years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City.
“The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Muhammad’s latest book, won the American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Notable for its lengthy discussion of the role of the social sciences, the book was the basis for Muhammad’s lecture at the Rowe Center for Undergraduate Education.
“The way we think and talk about black people as criminals…is not only foundational and crucial but as old as the wiring in this room,” Muhammad explained at the beginning of his presentation. “We are still powering our ideas and conversations from this early moment.”
Muhammad stated that his argument is that “we’ve never gotten past this moment.” Muhammad centered his focus on this concept, using concrete historical examples to expand on the crises that existed in the early 20th century to those seen today. By integrating the problems of jobs, education and imprisonment and incarceration, Muhammad explained how these struggles were not specific to race in order to displace the notions about black people he stated earlier.
Beginning by explaining that black people could not be seen as criminals until the end of slavery, Muhammad gave reasons for these early thoughts on black people that led into “the moment.” He pulled in examples from arguments made by those that favored slavery, abolitionists and stories told about the justification of black servitude.
Muhammad also compared the kind of racism and struggle that European immigrants faced in the 1890s to those seen presently against with black people. He argued against the use of crime statistics as evidence for violence and for the use of social work, with examples set by Jane Addams, the founder of the first community center and juvenile court in Chicago, as well as the NAACP.
