The CSI Legal Studies Institute presents the Lecture 1 in the Fall Lecture Series: Studies in Race, Crime, and Public Policy, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” on Monday, Oct. 19 in the Center for the Arts (Building 1P) Williamson Theatre at 5:00pm. A reception will follow.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2011). A native of Chicago, he received his PhD in American History from Rutgers University, after which he spent seven years on the faculty of Indiana University. Muhammad recently served on the National Academy of Sciences committee to study the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration, and is currently working on his second book, Disappearing Acts: The End of White Criminality in the Age of Jim Crow.
Abstract of Book and Lecture:
The idea of Black criminality was crucial to the making of the modern urban U.S., as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of Black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class Whites and European immigrants, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence that such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
