Historian who works of the incident most recently on helping Education Program still present each historian and a guide a question and answer session toward the end. And if you think you might like other Program Sponsor please go to our website. Now enjoy the book breaks. Hello and welcome everyone to today, july 19, 2020s addition of the institutes new Digital Program book break. Our guest today is professor and will be talk about his book the condemnation. First for those of you who are new to the institute, we are the leading Nonprofit Organization dedicated to k12 history education, will also serve in the general public. Our mission is to help about the knowledge and understanding of American History to Educational Programs and resources such as a book breaks, the hamilton Education Program online, teacher seminars, and also an incredible access to thousands and thousands of pieces of primary source documents that are part of the guilder linderman Institute Collection part i am your moderator, when i am not here in book break and usually part of the hamilton Education Program team. And today im supported by our it support specialist and one of our great interns, Cameron Murray or it for you guys in her audience out there you will notice you are muted and your cameras are off. Theres nothing wrong this is just to make sure that everyone has a great time. Im sure todays discussion will generate many, many questions. So to make sure we will get as many questions answered, you just checked at the bottom of your screen. You will see that great little q a icon. Please go ahead and submit any questions you have there. They are monitoring the questions as they are being submitted and you can submit it anytime during the program. If you could, just let us know where you are writing from. We want to know where our audience is coming from. Alright, now for todays guest is professor Khalil Gibran muhammad. He is a professor of race and policy at the Harvard School in the institute for advanced studies. Hes also the former director of the Schomburg Center for research and black culture which is a division is a division of the new york public library. Its a world leading library and archive of global history. Before leaving the Schomburg Center professor Khalil Gibran muhammad wasnt professor at indiana university. Today will be speaking with him about his book, the condemnation of blackness. Race, crime, and the making of modern urban america. Professor its great to have you here on the program. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having a. You do great work trades host to kick off the conversation i just finished reading your book this morning. And it was an incredible read. It is a great work of history in its own right. But also touches upon so many important issues that we are dealing with as a nation today. Systemic racism, mass incarceration, policing, and the criminal Justice System. In one of the questions i have just to get started is interesting how you came to write the book. And especially in the. That you focus on in the progressive era, the end of the 19th an early 20th century. Many times just in general American History we kind of go from the civil war to the mid h century. And we leave out this huge. In American History. So please tell us a little bit how you came to focus on this period of American History. Guest sure thats a great question. Interest make a so many of the teachers who follow certainly appreciate all these chapters matter. Particularly the progressive era as we understand the modern american state so much of what the regulatory state is, and our contemporary moment was born out of the progressive era. Income taxes, the agencies that protect our food supply. And the basic infrastructure of the social welfare system has the truth in era. I was interested as a graduate student but particularly interested because when i started to understand what was the experience that africanamericans experience in the Justice System in the late 19th century outside of itself, i looked at the literature and it was mostly silent on black experiences. A lot was about european immigrants. A lot was very much about the settlement house experience. The jane addams is and so on and so forth. So there is this gaping hole. And i attempted to fill it. Thats kind of how i got into the progressive era. When you start the book and Something Else that is very relevant for us today is kind of the change in the weight race was being looked at from after the civil war from this biological perspective to a more sociological, cultural perspective. And the role of data and how that started to come into make this idea of criminalizing being black. Can you talk a little bit about that . And especially the book i believe in chapter two, 1896 hoffman race traits. And how that started to play a greater role at the end of the h century. Yeah. So many ways the condemnation of blackness is kind of a big complicated story. Because it sets out to tell an origin story. At the same time it is tracking carious from the period after slaverys when you see the emergence of black codes permissive the development of conflict leasing is most essentially when the criminal Justice System in the south attempts to re enslave and seize the 13h amendment slavery loopholes. Basic notion you could no longer simply take advantage of black people by enslavement. But she could take advantage of you criminalize them. That is the story of the late 1h century, jim crow right up to the civil rights movement. Right in the way, william, you described how people think about these histories. But it turns out that there is a separate trajectory that in many ways is lesserknown to be sure. But also perhaps more revealing for mass incarceration its outside the south in the story that doesnt so much involved rich mobs and braces sheriffs, its really about its about language and discourse as a national way of agreeing that its a dangerous criminal. In that story origin runs through a particular individual. You mention his name Frederick Hoffman who is a fascinating figure. A lot of people who know the history of public health, or more generally no statistics or occupational science or actuarial science no free to because about 50 years he was perhaps the nations leading to my demographer. He was a Single Authority he kind of cut his teeth when most american demographers were just Getting Started just seeing emerging trends in statistical data, particularly around health and mortality. So how does data tell us something that is much more relevant to our temporary time with lynch mobs leasing dont tell us. The first thing you have to know about data is that its part of a political project. Its an expression of power. And as an artifact of complicated reality. It sort of a sliver of something. And Many Americans today think about data as a fact spray theres a fact that there are so many people in prison. Yes that is a fact. It is a fact that somata people are arrested annually in any number of cities. This is all true. But those facts are themselves born of political decisions we have made about where we could deploy police. How many people do incarcerate. In other which you cant get to prison unless they decide the punishment is incarceration. So all of these facts we are quite comfortable in her normal born in the late 19th century for particular purpose. They were particular in the way that they were ordering racial hierarchies. So again we might recognize hers rampant white discriminate discriminate tory and multiple would not dispute that to this day. So when you were in alford can american and tried to to cast about to vote for republican the south you might be intimidated from showing up at the polls. You might actually defend your right to vote as a black man having won the right with the 1h amendment. I could talk back you might be arrested for anything. So that is just one small slice of the effort to criminalize black freedom which meant what . I met people would prosecuted for crimes and sometimes in a prison fine or in the traditional prison. That all produce data. In that data accumulated so much so that by the 1890 census was really the first census where an entire cohort of africanamericans were sort of measured against another imagine previous generation that people said well, black people have been enslaved, they are kind of dangerous damaged goods pretty cant really tell what theyre capable of because they had been enslaved in the proslavery people believed black people were not capable of selfgovernance. So no longer plays, theyre going to backslide in some kind of savagery. They say no, no, no its an abomination at degraded people as the people were enslaved they could rise to the occasion. Its kind of giving you a sense of debate that was happening. Said in the 1890 census was kind of like a perfect generational cohort. If you are 25 years old, youre born in 1865 for the end the civil war youd never experienced slavery. So for that young generation the idea was like hey, lets see how they are doing. How many babies are they having . What kind of diseases have they contracted . Are they getting arrested for crimes . Are they showing up in the prison statistics . Hoffman was one of them, german immigrants who came 1880s there were many others. And what did they find in the 1890 census . They found the africanamerican population in america at 12 but is overrepresented in the prisons at 30 . Now we can just stop there, william, we could end this whole conversation that was just the beginning of a national conversation. That was the opening fact for redefining the National Spirit around us that like wait a minute. If africanamericans are overrepresented in our nations prisons, one generation after slavery, they maybe this whole abolition then was a mistake . Maybe granting them full citizenship in the 14th amendment was a mistake. And it began whether or not black people could in fact truly be real citizens of the nation. And it began to close the ideological divide between the northerners and the southerners. It was exactly in this moment Confederate Monument started popping up in the late 1890s by the daughters of the confederacy. And guess what, are people did not stand in the way. See you begin to see that statistical anomaly, that Racial Disparity in prison statistics was not about the over incarceration or the criminalization or the racial terror or the conflict lease opportunities of the peoples whose children were taken from them to be sold at sheriffs auction the on the back plantation their parents have been freed from. All of those disclaimers, those footnotes come this asterix none of that was part of the conversation. And it was hoffman, who in this book that was published in 1896 is really the first person to popularize this idea. He was the person to use a kind of Malcolm Gladwell analogy. He was the outlier who helped to tip the conversation and the nation towards this kind of new understanding. Like yes, these people do have a special crime problems we are going to keep an eye on them. We are going to create discriminatory practices in policing. Are not going to give them the same access to things that is set in motion a whole lot of other things. And you mentioned early also that theres so much material about immigrant communities out there. And a lot of the studies back then show how there is an overrepresentation of new immigrants to the country because northern cities were filled with all these european immigrants. Activists identify within those communities that it was the condition they were living in as the cause of a lot of that. And as you call in the book americans in progress. It is how they were described. So there was a way to alleviate they could be brought into the fold. But then the same way of thinking was not applied to africanamericans. And especially during the great migration were africanamericans moving to northern cities. You have to do with them selves can you talk a little bit more about that and how there was this double standard . Its a really great part of the story. And it is one that would surprise most readers. All people sort of understand and can and appreciate theres eight northern racism story that is in the 19th century and Crime Statistics become a way for northerners to say oh well they are criminals. Maybe those are right didnt learn this in history class but they sort of understand this makes sense. This universal idea that all criminals get treated the same is completely historical record does not hold up. Essentially there is a version of the deserving and undeserving quote unquote criminal and the american past. And what happens is, people, demographers who were interested in making an argument against the presence of southern and Eastern European they supported it with a supported immigration restriction. That there were too many italians in america that they were polluting the nordic stock of the nation. They were too many poles and catholics. Too many russian jews. An oldfashioned backbone anglo saxon that were the pureblood of this nation. So there was a lot of racism directed towards southern Eastern Europeans. A lot of nativism in all of these ways. What occurs is, they becomes another parallel debate on how to understand Crime StatisticsCrime Statistics of the italians was used as a way of restricting italians. And everyone knows thats exactly what happens basically cut drastically at one conservative triumph of using Crime Statistics to say theres something wrong even with a class of europeans that are beneath the Northern European types. The late 19th century was the high watermark of pure racist science in america. I didnt leave too many people untouched by this. But progressives, liberals, overwhelmingly northerners, began to make an argument saying wait a minute. No absolutely not. The evidence of disproportionate criminal offending by the italian immigrants or the irish first generation american or the polish catholic is not an indication of something wrong with their blood or their bodies, it is in fact a representation or evidence of the class inequality for the economic inequality. The blinding effects of industrialization on immigrants who are here and being taken full advantage of and have to survive by participating in underground economies. Because the industrial economy is not assimilating or fully incorporating them. So you get this, this very strenuous argument in favor of a structural critique of american capitalism that immigrant Crime Statistics is evidence for class inequality. What condemnation shows is the same people, including Frederick Hoffman that argued port Lower East Side of new york city immigrants who were struggling and committing various kinds of underground economy crimes or killing it rather because they were short temper bird and pissed often alienated from society, Frederick Hoffman action made a progressive argument to say that the evidence of those homicides is evident of industrializations effect on people. Whereas hoffman and many others said the evidence of high rates of crime among africanamericans is evident. And i wanted to read a quote from the book of one particular person. It wasnt as if all of this happened without a counter argument. And so someone named him be ball didnt early prison study were he took on the argument that hoffman was making. And you can hear in his frustration in this that im going to share with you he is in fact taking on the same kind of statistical critique that many people today would argue about Crime Statistics. And so here is the quote. He says that figures in themselves mean nothing. They must be carefully analyzed and studied in connection with social conditions. Without taking into account sociological factors, statistics were insufficient basis upon which to draw conclusions and could easily become missed representations of reality. He wrote, there are three kinds of lives. White lies, black lies, and statistics. So i share that because it is not as if it went unchallenged. As aye prison inspector in philadelphia at the time did early on, w eb challenge Frederick Hoffman, ida b wells challenge Frederick Hoffman and the body of work that would justify lynching happening around the country. But the basic idea that statistics can be read or interpreted or used to justify just about anything which is the story of european immigrants. Progressive statistics say we are going to help people. The same progressives and other conservatives use black statistics today, we are going to isolate segregation. [inaudible] host this is actually perfectly into my next question those going to ask about africanamerican scholars as well. And in some ways a very difficult position they were put in in a way because they were both wanted everyone to recognize the situation these africanamerican communities but they were also almost trying to agree with some of the scholarship at the same time. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the work that they did to highlight these issues at that time . Guest we could spend the remaining time talking about because they deserve that much attention pray to i encourage everyone to learn more about them if you dont. They left quite a remarkable amount of documents behind tha