Were going to be presenting an imported book to the mark in history which unlike 18th century behind the name or current important books by some of the major in our country. It also be reporting by the historian who works at the institute. It must frequently on health education. And then we will guide a question and answer questions our state and pretty in the Program Sponsored by them please go to our website. Now enjoy. Khalil muhammad hello and welcome everyone today pretty july 19th, 2020 addition of the institutes new Digital Program a gain in august today is a professor and he be talking about his book the condemnation of blackness. First for those of you are new to the institute pretty we are the leading Nonprofit Organization dedicated to k12 History Education while also serving the general public. And her mission is to help promote the knowledge and understanding of American History through Educational Programs and resources such as the Hamilton Education program online, teachers seminars and also an incredible access to thousands and thousands of primary source documents that are part of the institutes collection. I am your moderator flowing and when im not working here i am usually part of the Hamilton Education program team. And today i am supported by our support specialists in one of our great interns cameron murray. For you guys, and our audience out there, you will notice that your muted and cameras are off. If theres wrong. This is just make sure that everyone is going to have the time. Im sure that todays discussion will generate many many questions so make sure were going to try to get as many questions answered. You just check at the bottom of your screen. You see that great little q a icon, please go ahead and submit any questions you have there. And they are being monitored as they are being submitted printed and you can send anytime you want during this program and if you could come to some this note where your writings are from. We want to know where our audience is coming from. Now our guest today and is professor of greek and Public Policy and susan young murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study pretty is also the former director of the Schomburg Center for research in black culture with the division is a division of the New York Public Library in the worlds leading library of global back black history and before leaving the Schomburg Center see both professor mohammed was an associate professor at Indiana University and today will be speaking with him about his book, the condemnation of blackness, race and crime and the makings of modern urban america. And professor mohammed it is great to have you here in the program pretty think is much for joining is pretty. Khalil Gibran Muhammad thank you for having me and it is a pleasure. You do a really great work. William to kick up the conversation, just finished reading your book this morning. It was an incredible read. It is a great book of history in its own right. It also touches upon so many important issues that we are dealing with as a nation today. Systemic racism, mass incarceration, please change in the criminal Justice System. In one of the questions i have to get started im interested in how you came to write the book and especially the. That you focused on and the progressive area at the end of the 19th and early centuries kissing times just in general American History, we kind of go from the civil war to the mid 20th century knowing about this huge. In American History. So please tell us a little bit about how you came to focus on this period of American History. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a great question. Its interesting because the money the teachers and others who followed, and certainly appreciate that these matter. Particularly as we understand that modern america states. So much of the regulatory state is in our contemporary moment. Those born out of the progressive area, income taxes, agencies that protect our food supplies. In the basic infrastructure of a social welfare system has the truth in the progressive area so i was always fascinated by it is a graduate students. But i was particularly interested because when i started to try to understand what was the experience and africanamericans in the criminal Justice System in the late 19th century outside of the south, i looked at the literature is mostly silent on black experiences. A lot of it was european immigrants, the settlement house experiences so on and so forth. So there was this gaping hole and i attempted to fill it. William and when you start the book and Something Else very relevant for us today is the kind of the change in the way that race was being looked at from after the civil war from this biological perspective to more sociological culturals perspective. The role of data and how that started to come in to make this idea of criminalizing be black. Can you talk a little bit about that. And one of your chapters frederick huffmans train and how that started to play a greater role at the end of the 19th century. It. Khalil Gibran Muhammad so many ways, the blackness, is a big complicated story the condemnation of blackness. It sets out to tell a story and at the same time that is tracking these three lines it carries from the. After slavery when you see the emergence of black codes and the development of leasing especially when the criminal Justice System in the south attempts to re enslaved African Americans. There was a loophole, that you can no longer simply take advantage of black people by enslavement but you could take advantage of them if you could criminalize them. So that through line is the story of the night 19th century and jim crow and right up to the civil rights movement. Time in the way of knowing that you described a lot of people think about the street. But it turns out that there is a separate trajectory that in many ways is lesser known to be sure. But also perhaps more revealing of our contemporary crisis of mass incarceration and racialized policing. It is a story outside of the south in a story that doesnt so much involved wench mobs and the German Shepherd but its about a technocratic language that emerges worried as a kind of national way the black people werent dangerous criminal class and that story runs through a particular person is a fascinating figure. A lot of people know the history of Public Health or more generally known that the history of their occupational actuarial science because from about 50 years, he was perhaps the nations leading demographer, a Single Authority on an expert in homicide in the nation. Any kind of cut his teeth in the late 19th century when the time when most american demographers were just getting started. He was quite distant and being emerging trends in this data particular run health and mortality. So how does data tell us something that is much more relevant to temporary times to say, lynch mobs dont tell us. So the first thing that you have to know about data is a part of a political project. An expression of power. It is an artifact of complicated realities the sort of sliver of something. Many americans today often think about data as a spec. So if theres a fact that some many people in prison. That is a fact its a fact that some many people are arrested annually in a number number of cities. This is all true. But those facts are themselves born of political decisions we make about where we deploy police. How many people do we incarcerate. You cant get to prison unless somebody as a punishment is incarceration. Solo these facts that we are comfortable with. They were particular in the way that they were ordering racial hierarchy. So again, we might recognize that there was rapid White Supremacy and discrimination in the south in the late 19th century. Most people do not dispute that to the state. To vote for republican in the south, you might be intimidated from showing up at the polls. He might actually defend your right to vote as a black man, having won the right in the 16th amendment and if you talk back, you might be arrested for anything so that is just one part which meant what. But people were prosecuted from crime and sentence and sometimes served time in prison farm rated or in a traditional prison. Develop produced data. The data accumulated so much so that by the 1890s, which is really the first instance where an entire cohort of africanamericans were sort of measured against another imagine previous generation the people said well, black people they been enslaved and theyre kind of dangerous, damaged goods. It really cant tell what theyre capable of because they been enslaved. In the proslavery people believed that black people were not capable of strong governments. Suits no longer slaves, of course are going to backslide into some kind of savagery. Slavery was morally corrupt. It is abomination. Integrated people. So people will rise to the occasion. They give you a sense of this debate that was happening. Its kind of like a perfect generational cohort. If youre 25 years old, if you were born at the end of the civil war, you never experienced slavery so for that and generation and it was like hey, see how they are doing. How many babies are the having, what kind of thesis that the contracted. Are they getting arrested for crimes. Are they up in the prison systems. The first generation of demographers, but there were many others. And what did they find in the 1890s census. They found that the africanamerican population in america at the time of 12 percent but is overrepresented in the prisons at 30 percent. Now, we can stop there william. We get in a full conversation say is an interesting fact, lets move on. With no that was just the beginning of a national conversation. That was the opening fact or redefining that National Spirit around an idea that we twominute. If africanamericans are overrepresented in our nations prisons, one for generation after slavery, this maybe this whole evolution thing was a mistake maybe granting them full citizenship the 14th amendment was a mistake. And it began to narrow the conversation about whether or not black people could infect truly be real citizens of the nation. And it began to close this ideological divide between northerners and southerners. It is exactly this moment that confederates monument started to pop up all over the country in the late 1890s by the united daughters of the confederacy. What. A lot of people didnt stand in the way. So you begin to see that anomaly, the Racial Disparity in prison, statistics was not about the over incarceration of the criminalization of the racial terror or the opportunities that happen are the black people who were chosen were taken to them to be sold at an auction so they could be put back on the scene plantation that their parents had been freed from. All of those disclaimers of those footnotes, none of that was part of the conversation. And in this book, it was published in 1896 was the first person to kinda popularize this. Does the person the person to use the kind of Malcolm Gladwell analogy. He was the outlier who helped to tip the conversation in the nation sources kind of new understanding like what yes these people do have a special problem with crime so well keep an eye on them. And we are going to create the practices and placing braided were going to segregate them in northern cities. Were not going to give them the same access and that was kind of set in motion a whole lot of other things. William you mentioned also theres so much material about immigrant communities of other timing and that a lot of the studies back and showed how that wasnt overrepresented tatian of criminality in young new immigrants to the country because northern cities were filled with all of these european immigrants. Actavis, identified with those communities but it was the conditions that they were living in is the cause of a lot of that. You called it americans in progress. Thats how the work described. So there was a way to alleviate that. If they be brought into the fold. But then the same way of thinking was not apply to africanamericans especially during the great migration with africanamericans living from south to northern cities. Will they have to themselves up by the bootstraps. They have to do it themselves. Can you talk more about that. And it was a double standard. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a really great part of the story. And its one that would suffice most readers. While people can sort of understand and appreciate theres northern racism story that emerges in the late 19th century printed and crimes become a way for northerners to say, they are criminals so maybe we should keep an eye on things. People did not learn this in history class with the sort of understand that that make sense. What is not so obvious is this universal eyesight idea that all criminals get treated the same his completely false idea. Officially theres a version of deserving and undeserving in the market path. What happens is demographers who were interested in making an argument against the presence of southern and Eastern Europeans. The people who supported the movements and immigration restrictions. So there were too many italians in america pretty they were polluting the nordic stock of the nation. There were too many catholics and too many russian jews. Those people were not oldfashioned hardworking background anglosaxons that were the pureblood of this nation. So there was a lot of racism directed toward the southern and Eastern Europeans. A lot of negative but is on. What occurs there becomes another parallel debate about how to understand Crime Statistics. The Crime Statistics by the italians were used as a way to restrict italians. And everyone knows the bite 1924, that is exactly what happened. We passed and immigration quotas acted basically cut drastically the number of italians they could come into the united states. Thats one blissful conservative triumph of using Crime Statistics to say that something is wrong even with the class of the europeans, the northern europeans. The late 19th century was the high watermark of pure raised science in america. Invented leave too many people in touch by this. But progressive, liberals, overwhelmingly the northerners. To begin to make an argument it is a waving of minutes, absolutely not. The evidence of disproportionately noumenal offending by the italian immigrants or the irish first generation americans or the polish catholics is not an indication of how something wrong in the blood of the body. It is in fact a representation or evidence of the class of the quality of the economic inequality, the blinding effects of industrialization on immigrants who are here and being taken advantage of and have to survive by participating in underground economies because industrial economy is not fully incorporating them. So you get this very strenuous argument in favor of a structural critique of capitalism that we immigrant Crime Statistics is evidence of class inequality. And what condemnation shows the same people including Frederick Hoffman who argued that for Lower East Side of new york city immigrants who were struggling and committing various kinds of underground crimes or killing each other because they were short tempered and for soft and alienated from society. Frederick hoffman actually made a progressive argument to say that the evidence of those homicides evidence of industrializations effects on people. Wheres hoffman and many others said that the evidence of high rate of crime among africans is their pathology. And i wanted to read from the book of one particular person because it was not as if all of this happen without a counter argument. And so when named in did nearly recent study that took on the argument that hoffman was making. And you can hear in his frustration in this court that i will share with you that he is in fact taking on the same kind of statistical critique that many people today argue about Crime Statistics. So heres the quote. He says that figures in themselves mean nothing. They must be carefully analyzed and studied in connection with social convictions. Without taking into account known factors, specifics were insufficient basis upon which to draw conclusions i could easily be become misrepresentations of reality. Wrote there are three kinds of lies. Someone says white lies, likewise and statistics. So i sure that because it is not as if hoffman went unchallenged in the white prison inspector in philadelphia at the time dad in early on. And there was a challenge of Frederick Hoffman. Ida b wells, challenge him and the body of work that was just fine lynching happening around the country but the basic idea that this can be read or interpreted it or to justify just about anything. Which is the story of european immigrants. Progressive uses to help people printed in the same progressives and other conservatives use black statistics say move will isolate segregate and discriminate against these people. William and actually that fits in my next question. Africanamerican stories as well into boyds. And in some the very difficult position they were put in in a way because they both wanted everyone to recognize the situation in these African American communities and urban communities. They were also almost trying t