The Condemnation of Blackness

Black criminality is the linking of Blackness to criminality and vice. The Condemnation of Blackness explores the history of the term and how this conflation of race and crime was instituted on a systemic scale after the Civil War. Black criminality was constructed by scholars like Frederick L. Hoffman, who used racial statistics in their research to argue that Black people were biologically prone to committing crime. Black criminality was maintained through time by police, Mayors, and other government officials who committed resources to fighting crime in white neighborhoods whilst neglecting Black neighborhoods. This systemic neglect of Black communities ensured that they suffered higher crime rates, perpetuating the links between race and crime. The ideology became increasingly popular through the decades covered in Muhammad’s text and has survived centuries, existing even in today’s America.

The “Negro Problem” was a term that arose in postbellum America. Coined by white intellectuals like Nathanial Shaler, it described white America’s anxieties over the Emancipation Proclamation and the belief that Black freemen would not be able to live successfully in American society. Muhammad argues that the Negro Problem drove the ideological birth of Black criminality as a way to enforce white supremacy.