Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. vii + 380 $35.00 (ISBN 978-0-674-03597-3).

Abstract

When I was a high school student in Maryland during the 1980s, I remember my social studies teacher's lecture on the aftermath of the United States Civil War. According to her, blacks were actually worse off following the end of slavery because they had few resources to draw on and their former white masters were only concerned about them as a threat and a social irritant. Because blacks were no longer enslaved, they wandered aimlessly over the southern landscape and committed petty crimes in order to survive. I do not remember any mention by her of the black legislators, businessmen, ministers, and teachers who attempted to build a new life for themselves and the region. My teacher's portrayal of the South during Reconstruction as a chaotic place filled with formerly enslaved blacks rambling about clearly implied the need for law and order. Khalil Gibran Muhammad's bold new study of the links between race and criminalization helps to explain why high school teachers like mine believed that blacks (and the country as a whole) were much better off having slavery.