The Condemnation of Blackness

In Part 2, Muhammad investigates early concepts of white allyship in American history, analyzing racial liberals and how they worked in relation to Black scholars through the early to mid-20th century on Black criminality. Three significant ideas come into focus. First, Muhammad defines the “racial liberal” and why this movement of scholarship is historically important. Second, these chapters establish the limits of American white allyship of the Progressive era, explaining the caveats to racial liberals’ progressivism. Finally, Chapter 4 establishes how the ideology of racial liberals encouraged a color line that divided the quality of social aid delivered between white and Black communities in need. These three ideas support the argument that there were significant limits to the allyship of racial liberals, whose work often inadvertently fueling Black criminality instead of helping defeat it.

Racial liberals were a movement of white progressive scholars that first formed at the beginning of the 20th century. Their research was a significant force of change in the tide of race scholarship in the United States because they argued that crime in the Black community was not caused by biological inferiority but by social and environmental factors. While Black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois had already been making similar arguments, but they were often marginalized in the national academic discourse. Racial liberals, on the other hand, could rely on their whiteness to grant their arguments more legitimacy.

Muhammad argues that racial liberals were also of special note because of their research methodology. In Chapter 3, Muhammad looks to sociologist Francis Kellor as an example of how racial liberals used brand new social science methods in efforts to combat Black criminality. With her series of articles titled “The Criminal Negro,” published in 1901, Kellor argued that “racial tendencies alone cannot explain” higher rates of arrests and incarceration amongst Black Americans (83). She attacked the method of using racial statistics to defend Black criminality, turning instead to the lack of social aid provided by those (white Americans) in power to explain why Black communities experienced higher rates of crime. Her argument employed the methodology of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso to effectively show that biological evidence of Black inferiority did not exist.

Kellor was also an example of how racial liberals were committed to social work as well as academia. Many racial liberals straddled their time between publishing studies and helping urban communities in practical ways. This was another quality of their work that separated racial liberals from other white scholars of the time, reflecting how seriously they took the issue of Black advocacy. Kellor, for instance, founded the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, which Muhammad claims “represented the height of white progressives’ attempts to save black women from prostitution” (134). Kellor devoted significant time and resources to her League and helping uplift Black women, but in helping them, she perpetuated some of the most harmful attitudes surrounding Black women of the time. Her League was founded on the idea that all Black women had issues within their psyche—learned from the inferior cultural within the Black community—that needed addressing. In essence, Kellor’s league sought to reform Black women in the image of “virtuous” white femininity.

Analysis of Kellor’s work reveals the nature of racial liberalism. Whereas white supremacists wrote crime into race with their methodology of racial statistics and biological arguments, Muhammad argues that racial liberals wrote crime into culture. Thus, they did not undermine the theory of Black criminality. Instead, these white progressives replaced a biological explanation for Black inferiority for a cultural one. Muhammad summarizes the racial liberals’ propensity for cultural arguments and its effect on the Black criminality discourse:

In other words, [writing crime into culture] was the initial product of twentieth-century racial liberals’ first successful attempts […] to defend the humanity of blacks and their right to fair play in American society, and at the same time to concede that blacks were still sufficiently inferior behaviorally or socially to warrant special attention, but not necessarily special help (113).

Muhammad pinpoints the racial liberals’ logical paradox. They insisted that Black Americans were not biologically prone to crime and advocated for Black rights. At the same time, they still implicitly agreed that Black people were inferior to whites.

In Part 2, Muhammad establishes how racial liberals represented a middle ground between the explicit racism of white supremacists like Hoffman and the anti-racism of Black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. Also of note is racial liberals’ beliefs of Black self-sufficiency. As Muhammad points out, white progressives thought that Black Americans warranted “special attention, but not necessarily special help” (113). Racial liberals believed that Black people deserved rights and wellness but argued that Black communities needed to secure these things for themselves due to the supposed cultural incongruities between white and Black Americans.

This was an especially damaging component to the ideology of racial liberalism. Their argument that only Black Americans could solve the cultural issues that lead to Black crime and incarceration rates paved the way for white social workers later in the century who turned a blind eye to Black communities and justified their negligence by claiming their efforts helping Black Americans would be a waste of time.

While Chapter 3 defines and describes the work of racial liberals, Chapter 4 compliments it by exploring how such work influenced America’s social work in the Progressive era. Muhammad illustrates the color line that existed in the urban North’s public service by conducting comparative analyses of settlement houses in the Progressive era North. The missions, funding, and longevity of settlement houses that serviced white and/or immigrant communities versus the settlement houses that serviced Black communities were markedly different. One example of the social work available to immigrant communities was North Philadelphia’s Friends Neighborhood Guild (FNG).

The FNG defined its purpose along class lines, proclaiming its mission to help raise children out of lifestyles of poverty and crime. Notably, this class definition allowed the FNG to avoid mentions of race in its work, which gave them room to avoid doling out aid to Black communities. Instead, the FNG helped immigrants assimilate into their new national culture and become proud Americans. The Guild benefited from funding that allowed them to bring immigrant children on field trips, including one famous trip to Washington D.C. and the White House. As Muhammad observes, “their visit to President William McKinley demonstrates the powerful resources that settlement house workers marshaled to enrich the American dreams of European immigrants” (159).

By contrast, social aid workers that wanted to help Black communities suffered from a lack of systemic support from the government—nor could they rely on long-term private benefactors. A fruitful example of the Black progressive experience of the social work color line can be seen with Ida B. Wells’s Negro Fellowship League, opened in 1910. On her mission to prevent crime in Chicago, Wells successfully partnered with Mrs. Victor F. Lawson, who promised to fund the League. When Mrs. Lawson died three years later, her husband withdrew support, arguing that it “should have been ‘self-supporting’ by that time” (131). One will note that Mr. Lawson’s argument for withdrawing aid to fight crime in Black communities mirrors racial liberals’ beliefs that Black Americans must be self-sufficient and fix their own issues without white aid.

Thus, the color line which caused a disparity in the resources and aid afforded to Black versus white communities was partly fueled by the racial liberals who were publishing their work at this time. Part 2 establishes a clear throughline between the paradoxical allyship of racial liberals and the systemic denial of Black communities with social aid and resources.