The Condemnation of Blackness

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.

This era in American history spanned from 1896 to 1916. The Progressive Era was characterized by social reform movements that drew increased awareness to political corruption, housing issues, and crime, among other issues. With his book, Muhammad researches the relationship between Progressive era reformers of the urban North and Black communities, investigating to what extent these reformers helped reinforce ideas of Black criminality.

The color line describes how the social, economic, and political experiences of Black and white Americans are vastly different through history because of systemic discrimination. While the color line is used in contemporary race research to refer to the situation of other races and ethnicities in American society, the term originated in referring to the specific situation of Black Americans. The color line is a recurring theme throughout The Condemnation of Blackness. While Part 2 describes how the color line informed how white progressives viewed the issue of crime across white/immigrant and Black communities, Part 3 illustrates how the color line expressed itself in discriminatory policing methods and the disbursement of social aid/crime fighting efforts in Northern cities (which favored white communities over Black neighborhoods).

Racial liberals were a movement of white progressives who worked in conjunction with Black race reformers to combat ideologies of Black inferiority and criminality. Muhammad argues that while racial liberals were important allies to Black race reformers, there were limits to their allyship. Racial liberals believed that Black crime rates were a result of inherent flaws in Black culture. Their arguments displaced biological explanations of Black criminality for cultural explanations. The Condemnation of Blackness illustrates how racial liberals thus perpetuated links between race and crime.