- Good evening, I'm Catherine Epstein, Provost and Dean of the faculty at Amherst College. Welcome to the third lecture in our series on the History of Anti-Black Racism in America. This series is premised on the notion that to understand anti-Black racism today, we need to know much more about the history of anti-Black racism in the United States. We need to know how the history of racism has shaped every aspect of our societal structures, from housing to education to policing to voter suppression, and much more. Moreover, the fact that anti-Black racism has had such an enduring power in our society brings even greater urgency to the need to address anti-Black racism today. With this goal in mind, this series features some of the most distinguished black historians of the African American experience in the United States. Tonight we are honored to have Khalil Gibran Muhammad join us. Professor Muhammad has written path-breaking work on how crime statistics have been used in the past 130 years to blame African American communities for crime, rather than to point to the structural racist environment in which they lived. As the next speaker in our series, Elizabeth Hinton has written of Muhammad's book, "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America," quote, "The role of social science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work. It shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy makers subscribe to a statistical discourse about Black crime, one that shifted blame onto Black people for their disproportionate incarceration, and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice." Professor Muhammad, thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'd like to say just a few words of thanks to Jen Manion, Associate Professor of History at Amherst. Jen came up with the idea of doing a lecture series, and she is the one who has done all the work to bring our wonderful speakers to Amherst. At the same time, Jen has organized parallel events to the main lecture, each speaker holds a session with a class of Amherst College students. Following each lecture, Jen organizes hour-long discussion meetings for staff, faculty, and students. Participants read the speaker's work, as well as related articles. I want to thank everyone who is in attendance this evening, but also all of you who go even further and do the readings for the seminar and join Jen for discussion sessions. Jen, thank you for organizing the series, the class discussions, and the non-credit seminar. Thank you for everything that you've done to make this series the success that it is. Before turning this over to Jen, I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This lecture series is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, intended to support the cultivation of public scholarship in the humanities at Amherst College. Jen?
- Thank you, Provost Epstein. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, and the world's leading library and archive of global Black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an associate professor at Indiana University. Khalil's scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in modern US history. He is co-editor of "Constructing the Carceral State," a special issue of the "Journal of American History" from 2015, and a contributor to the 2014 National Research Council Study, "The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences," as well as the author of "Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America," published by Harvard, which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin best book award in American Studies. Much of his work has been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, including "The New York Times," "The New Yorker," "Washington Post," "The Nation," "National Public Radio," "Moyers & Company," and "MSNBC." He has appeared in a number of feature-length documentaries, including the Oscar nominated "13th" and "Slavery by Another Name." Khalil was an associate editor of the Journal of American History, and prior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University's Teachers College. He holds two honorary doctorates, and is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, and "The Nation" magazine, as well as the advisory boards of Cure Violence, Common Justice, The HistoryMakers, and the Lapidus Center for the Study of Transatlantic Slavery. Khalil is an award-winning teacher at Harvard, and has received numerous honors for his commitment to public engagement, including BPI Chicago's Champion of the Public Interest Award, the Fortune Society's Game Changer Award, Ebony Power 100, The Root 100 of Black Influencers, and "Crain's New York Business Magazine" 40 Under 40. A native of Chicago's South Side, Khalil graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in economics and his PhD in US history from Rutgers. I have long admired Professor Muhammad, both for his scholarship and public advocacy. His definitive work, "The Condemnation of Blackness," shatters long-standing claims by scholars that the racism of the criminal justice system was concentrated in large-scale prison labor camps in the South. Rather, Muhammad turns our attention to the North and shines a critical light on people viewed as progressive intellectuals and reformers. It is there, in the seemingly race-neutral work of Northern reformers and social scientists that the myth of Black criminality was legitimized. Professor Muhammad's scholarship has been at the heart of my course on the history of carceral culture for a decade, challenging my students to critically reconsider one of the most foundational myths of modern American life that has been used to justify both police violence towards Black Americans and mass incarceration. It is my absolute honor and pleasure to welcome Professor Khalil Muhammad to Amherst College to speak with us this evening about his path-breaking historic research and its relevance today.
- Thank you, thank you very much, Jen, and thank you to Provost Epstein for creating and supporting this series. I think it's really important, and I'm beginning to redefine myself as a historian of racism because all of us have become far more attuned to language and the mixed cross messages when we talk about race as somehow causative of this. I like to evoke, as something that my colleague from Radcliffe last year said, that race is not a comorbidity, the death of people in brown and black communities from COVID-19, it's racism. And so I'm becoming a little bit sharper about how I think about these things in relationship to my colleagues. So I decided tonight to share the bulk of my lecture drawing on a new preface that I wrote for "The Condemnation of Blackness" that came out a year ago, and the reason being, one, I haven't done it before, so it's kind of neat to get to do. I'll draw from it, along with some other observations that I've prepared for tonight's lecture, but also because, as you'll note in the lecture itself, there's a lot about a year ago that's very different from today. So with that, let me start. In the late fall of 2007, around the time I was editing the first edition of "The Condemnation of Blackness," I was administering the final exam in my Urban History course. One of my students handed in his blue book with an unusually cheerful smile. He was excited to share the news that he would soon be heading to campaign in Iowa for Senator Barack Obama. The moment has stayed with me because until then, I had given little thought to Obama's candidacy. Voting in the Democratic Parties had yet to begin, and if I'm honest, at that point, I didn't think he had much of a chance against Hillary Clinton. A couple of weeks later, Obama won the 2008 Iowa Caucus, and in November, he was elected the nation's first Black president. This incredible historical moment found me both awestruck and, I have to admit, panicked. My book was headed to press with a divisive race title that I feared no one would pay any attention to. Yes, I could still count on other historians and a few research librarians to notice and purchase the book. They would appreciate my findings that Northern white liberals and progressives were a big part of the history of racism in America's criminal justice system, a major correction to most histories that focused exclusively on Southern racists with their lynch mobs and chain gangs. I trusted that academic readers would see my new claims that today's crisis of mass incarceration had its roots not only in the Jim Crow South, but also in Northern cities. But I was convinced, like most authors, that everyone should, in fact, read this book, not just because I had poured nearly a decade into writing it but because I thought it could genuinely change how we thought about race, crime, and punishment. By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States is, after all, exceeds, after all, all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries. The United States didn't get to mass incarceration without mass participation in the criminalization of black and brown people by liberals and conservatives, Northerners and Southerners, Republicans and Democrats, whites and some blacks. And so by a long shot, the United States is, in fact, the world's leading jailer, and no aspect of national life, from the economy to education to electoral politics, has been untouched by the scale and scope of racialized policing and punishment. With a more honest and complete record of the nation's past, I hoped more people would learn from this history and choose to create a more compassionate, fairer, and racially just criminal legal system. And yet, in the hype of what many claimed was then a new post-racial America, I fretted that this book would be drowned out by the euphoria of all that "hopey changey stuff," as Sarah Palin once dubbed President Obama's vision. So I got the bright idea to change the title to "The Condemnation of Blackness" before the election of Barack Obama. In addition to making my vision less gloomy, I thought I might even be able to sell more copies by attaching my work to the wildly popular new president. Needless to say, I didn't change the title of my book. The first black president has come and gone, but the history told here remains the same, and if anything, the lessons are more urgent. When I first conceived this project, I wanted to answer a pretty straightforward question. I had learned about the use of the law after slavery and Reconstruction to criminalize black people, strip them of their newly earned civil and voting rights, and then force them back onto plantations as sharecroppers under the threat of punishment or death. Knowing all of this, I was curious about what happened in Chicago for people like my great grandparents, who left Mississippi during the early decades of the Great Migration. I was particularly keen to examine the criminal justice system outside of the South because I came of age when the first viral video of police brutality sparked protests. In 1991, nearly a dozen Californian highway patrolmen severely beat an intoxicated black motorist named Rodney King on the side of the road for speeding. King was the Emmett Till of my generation, just as the slain 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the 22-year-old Rekia Boyd are to my children's generation. None of the history I had learned helped explain the anti-Black violence, the miscarriages of justice, and the callous disregard and cheapness of Black life in a supposedly post-Civil Rights America. What I saw through the lens of my work was not tragedy in the killings of unarmed people, but the long arc of history. These were predictable outcomes based on the logic of weaponized fear and a legal system designed to associate blackness with dangerousness. We hear a lot about implicit bias research these days, and how our brains, especially white people's brains, see young Black people as older than they are, more threatening, and less human. This research has led to implicit bias training in some police departments and prosecutor's offices. But implicit bias is not the whole problem, nor does it alone change the rules governing use of force or prosecutorial discretion. For a century and a half, many of the best and brightest minds in America have produced volumes and volumes of research proving that on average, white people should be suspicious and downright fearful of Black people. We've heard a lot about this certainly in this election season. Our brains did not end up with blind spots on their own. We have all been taught early in life with whom to play, where to go to school, what neighborhood to live in, where to work, even where to shop, based on the risk of criminal victimization by a Black person. Racial bias, like segregation, is not accidental, it is deliberate. The point is to know precisely how racist myths were built in the first place, as well as understanding why they endure. In this, we might choose to discard them and to dismantle the policies they uphold. If the myth that Black people belong to a criminal race had died a shameful death in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, there might be no new edition or even a first edition of "The Condemnation of Blackness." It is precisely because the idea persists and has metastasized into other forms of racial criminalization that we must continue to pay scrupulous attention to this past. President Obama's successor in the White House, Donald Trump, has claimed repeatedly that Mexican rapists and criminals are flooding the country's borders and that he's keeping these same criminals out of the suburbs. Such myths have been extremely harmful to their intended victims. These myths are also pillars of the economic, political, and cultural infrastructure of America. The notion of Black criminality starts with Black resistance to enslavement, akin to defying the laws of gravity for Black people. It was inevitable that they would violate these laws because to be human was, for them, to be criminal. Their comings and goings, their gatherings and fellowshipping, their loving and laughing, carried the weight of sanction as far back as the 17th century, and of course, slave patrols were established to maintain, through violence and the threat of violence, the submission of enslaved people from uprisings and self theft. But we really don't get notions of Black criminality in the way that we thought of them today until after slavery in 1865. Those slave patrols brought landowning and landless whites duty-bound together in a shared collective project of policing Black life, and in many ways, that is the through line to our present. All of this, including ideas about Black criminality, are part of slavery's legacy of justifying why Black bodies have been used for white wealth creation, electoral politics, and popular culture. The end of the Civil War did not bring an end to plunder, political race baiting, and blackface, as we certainly saw in the story of Ralph Northam's Virginia medical yearbook from the 1980s. White supremacy did not die with slavery, it evolved during Reconstruction. The deliberate choice to abolish slavery except as punishment for crime left a gigantic loophole, in that the South attempted to leverage putting Black people back into some form of slavery during the earliest days of freedom. What that amounted to was that all expressions of Black freedom, from political rights, economic rights, and social rights were subject immediately to criminal sanction. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminal, and the only thing that wasn't criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land. Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South built a robust carceral machinery and began to sell Black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this, and for the next 70 years, the criminal justice system the society many whites claimed was now free of racism, African Americans had no excuse for their alleged crimes. It is hard to truly appreciate how soon after slavery many Northern white elites and some Black ones used crime statistics to emphasize the personal, that personal responsibility, bad behavior, and broken homes, and not systemic discrimination in the Jim Crow period or the age of separate but unequal accounted for these racial disparities. Crime statistics fueled gendered notions of Black male pathology, and when linked to illegitimacy rates, doubly burdened Black woman by defining them as sexually deviant and undeserving of the protections of womanhood. The turn to racial crime statistics, let me repeat, was a cutting edge idea made for modern times, built to last, like the electrical circuitry invented in Thomas Edison's New Jersey lab in the 1880s. That old technology is still hardwired behind the walls of our homes and workplaces, and it even powers our smartphones and laptops in this very moment. The old and the new often go hand in hand. If we refuse to see continuity and insist only on change, then we will miss what's behind the walls of our society, miss how it all works. We will not understand how it is possible that America built the greatest punishment system the world has ever known. The hunt for crime data to prove Black inferiority started in the 1890s when the New Jersey-based demographer Fredrick L. Hoffman began looking. Black people had only recently become citizens and therefore subjected to criminal prosecution in courts of law. Hoffman mined census reports and the local arrest statistics of a half dozen cities, from Chicago to Charleston, South Carolina. He showed that the, quote, "criminality of the negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country," and he insisted that the causes had nothing to do with structural inequality. The real problem, he noted, was a lack of personal responsibility. "Until the negro learns to respect life, property, and chastity," he warned, "until he learns to believe in the value of a personal morality operating in his daily life, crime will increase." Over a century later, the Department of Justice investigated the Ferguson Police Department in the wake of the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Federal agents found systemic racism among police offers and unconstitutional law enforcement practices, and yet, in their report, federal investigators wrote that Ferguson officials claimed that, quote, "Harsh and disparate results were not problems with police or court practices, but instead reflected a pervasive lack of personal responsibility among certain segments of the community." Three threads weave Frederick Hoffman and Ferguson officials' ideas together. First, racial disparities and crime rates are interpreted as Black traits, as pathological norms within Black people, and reflect group behavior. Second, neither criminal justice bias, nor structural racism, they argued, explain high crime rates among individual black people. Third, and finally, the language of personal responsibility implies a justification for anti-Black discrimination. Despite the separation of more than a century, both moments occurred in post-Civil Rights eras when police agencies were on the front lines of regulating Black citizenship. Indeed, there has never been a moment in history when law enforcement wasn't playing this role. "Too often, the policeman's club is the only instrument of the law with which the negro comes into contact," wrote Kelly Miller, a Black sociologist at Howard University and an anti-racist reformer, in 1935. "This engenders in him a distrust and a resentful attitude toward all public authorities and law officers, none can doubt that such a kindly attitude would go far to convince the negro of the value to himself and advantage of law obedience and good citizenship," Miller concluded. Kelly Miller's observation were part of a broader effort by Black reformers to fix policing a century ago. National Urban League researchers, such as Anna J. Thompson, a Black woman, and Ira Dea Reid, the Director of Research and Publicity at the National Urban League, conducted several studies of policing in the 1920s and '30s and found widespread evidence of discrimination and abuse. More than 30 years later, after the 1960s uprisings, the Kerner Commission came to a similar conclusion and made several recommendations. The Commissioners believed nothing would change without first acknowledging the structural racism built into policing, they called for the better treatment of Black citizens, more effective police protection, the establishment of independent citizen review boards, and an end to aggressive patrol. Sound familiar? When the esteemed social psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research informed the Brown versus Board of Education decision, testified before the Kerner Commission, he saw history repeating itself. "I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I was reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem Riot of 1935, the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem Riot of 1943, the report of the McCone Commission of the Watts Riot in 1965," he wrote, doubting that yet another report would make any difference. "I must again in candor say to you members of the Kerner Commission, it is a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland,' with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction." Neither Kelly Miller nor Kenneth Clark lived long enough to read the New York Police Department's Mollen Commission report of 1994, or the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Investigation of 2000, nor did they witness all the federal consent decrees and Justice Department reports, numbering something like 69, documenting in city after city a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing, Pittsburgh in 1997, Cincinnati in 2001, Detroit in 2003, New Orleans in 2010, along with Seattle, Cleveland in 2012, East Haven, Connecticut in 2012, New York, Albuquerque, Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Newark, and Chicago in 2017. All except one are places outside of the South, where law-abiding residents were systematically profiled, harassed, and abused. Countless men, women, and children, cis, trans, and queer folk, were harmed with over four million stops in New York City alone. Their crimes? Living while Black. 100 years of police brutality reports reminds me of a lynching roll published in 2014, and in 2014 report by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Four years later, Bryan Stevenson, the founding director of the Initiative, opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to honor the lives of over 4,000 victims of racial terror lynchings. The roll illustrates a state by state tally of every documented lynching from 1877, the end of Reconstruction, to about 1950. The lynching roll and the memorial itself are devastating proof of systemic racism in America. No matter the guilt or innocence of the victims, the state was complicit in the killings, given that there are no known prosecutions for these murders, done in the plain light of day. There is an arc of history that connects lynchings past to policings present, but some Americans continue to reject this view. They exclaim, "Blue lives matter" in utter defiance of Black Lives Matter activism, and they falsely equate doing a job, even if at times a dangerous one, with living in one's own skin. But there are no blue lives. Blue is not a shade of humanity. Blue is not protected by Civil Rights laws. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the Chicago Race Riot, which led to the first Blue Ribbon Commission on racialized policing in America. In the summer of 1919, white beach goers stoned a Black child swimming in Lake Michigan to death because he had crossed an aqueous color line. While Blacks protested and pursued justice, white mobs attacked Black pedestrians and home owners. Blacks fought back, 38 people died, hundreds more were injured. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested Blacks on suspicion, brought them into court without a bit of evidence of any offense. A former police chief admitted that Black migrants naturally attracted greater suspicion than was attached to the white man. Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination in a big Northern city were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners, in 1922, to abandon racial crime statistics altogether. And surprisingly, a century ago, the Chicago officials blamed much of the problem on implicit bias. Quote, "We recognize that these practices and tendencies are," they explained, "in large degree the unconscious result of traditional race prejudice." They recommended all criminal justice agencies must deal fairly and without discrimination with all persons charged with crime. From the beginning, the collection and dissemination of racial crime data was, in fact, a eugenics project, reflecting the supremacists beliefs of those who created them. It was an intentional way of sorting humanity, not by an objective standard, but by a convenient tool that simplified reality, justified racism, and redistributed political and economic power from black to white. The influential Harvard scientist Nathaniel Shaler wrote in an "Atlantic Monthly" article in 1890 that statistics can lead the way to a new understanding of Black people's true racial capacity. The statistics Shaler called for were not facts, they were artifacts and traces of intense social conflict and ideology, they also underwrote discrimination in all areas of public life. With vicious circular reasoning, a new data revolution became the basis for labeling an entire group of people criminal and then stripping them of their human and civil rights. Felony disenfranchisement law spread state by state, and are still with us. Law enforcement's dogged faith in the crime statistics numbers to this day is, as the late Federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham once wrote, "The same old poison of racial prejudices poured into new bottles." Once we committed to measuring Black lives and their worthiness as citizens and human beings by crime statistics, we never stopped. One of the most perverse uses of racial crime statistics by liberals and conservatives was to measure educational effectiveness by crime rates. Researchers published reports of how many Black vocational schools and colleges had alumni with criminal records. Southern leaders claimed education actually turned Blacks into criminals, citing census data that showed Black people were better educated in Northern states, but still had disproportionately higher crime rates than in the South. President Theodore Roosevelt used crime data to make a commencement address at Hampton Institute in 1906 where he told the graduates they should be proud that only two students out of 6,000 had marred the reputation of their school. He then warned that no challenge in Jim Crow America was a greater danger to them than fighting the criminality in your own race. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and psychological toll on those graduates, talk about being triggered, that year when 62 Black people were lynched and no one punished. We are still asking some of the same questions. "What have the thousands of Black churches and schools and colleges produced and maintained at the cost of more than 150 million dollars," inquired Thomas Nelson Page, a prominent white Southern intellectual in 1904. "We may first inquire," he noted, "has the percentage of crime decreased in the race generally?" Since the end of slavery, access to public education for Black people has been optional, or at least contingent, based on crime rates in ways that have not been true for the majority of white Americans. A Harvard economist published a study in 2012, quote, "Does school choice reduce crime?" He found that it did not, but in fact, greatly reduced criminal activity, that is, school choice, or charter schools. Should we be relieved? I often say to my students that any serious analysis of Harvard alumni's criminal activity over the span of the school's 384 year history would likely register huge economic costs to millions of people with severe collateral consequences. No one is counting, I mean, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but whether I'm right or not misses a larger point. No one is asking the question because no matter how big the financial crimes are, or how repugnant the corruption and illegal behavior of white elites is, there are no racial stakes. Underlying every education and crime study rests a preposterous racial assumption from the past: are Black people criminals and uneducable? Maybe schools don't matter, maybe schools cost too much, maybe schools are incapable of fixing these people. The early innovator, Hoffman, designed the education and crime blueprint when he wrote, "In the statistics of crime and the data of illegitimacy, the proof is furnished that neither religion nor education has influenced to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. Whatever benefit the individual colored man may have gained from the extension of religious worship and educational processes, the race, as a whole, has gone backwards rather than forwards." One generation after slavery, Hoffman's use of crime and illegitimacy rates established the view that Black education was a waste of time and money. To him and many others, the statistics proved resources were better spent educating whites. Even today's studies that pursue such research in the name of educational equity affirm the legitimacy of the enduring assumption. We're still counting and correlating and making tough on crime or smart on crime decisions about what Black people do or don't deserve in America. By always centering the conversation about how many Black people are currently under some form of criminal justice supervision, the collective guilt of Black people remains the core logic that continues to drive policy debates. In education, school effectiveness is not only judged on the basis of crime statistics, school itself, in too many instances, has become a correctional institution. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Locking up our Own," James Forman, the Yale Law Professor, describes a series of terrifying and humiliating police raids at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, DC during the spring of 2000. School officials organized a town hall meeting with police officers, the students told the officers what it felt like to be treated like criminals. The Black cops responded that the school was in a high-crime neighborhood, and suggested that maybe they should wear large student IDs. Many of the students had learned about the history of antebellum slave laws requiring manumission papers and South Africa Apartheid-era passbooks. Even those students who had studied none of this history could intuit the problem with IDs forming rights, as free citizens, they deserved the presumption of innocence. This realization was a crushing blow to student morale. "We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right, and they still treat us like dogs," said one student to Forman. This is what collective guilt looks like. And yet, it does not have to be this way. One of the most rewarding aspects of sharing my work with others is making the case that although the past is still with us, it doesn't have to be the future. I've served on a New York City Anti Gun Violence Taskforce, contributed to a National Academy of Sciences report, testified before Congressional staffers, like Senators Mike Lee and others who eventually wrote the bill that became the First Step Act. I've visited German prisons on an international trip to look at what are alternatives to what correction facilities look like when a do-no-harm approach sits at the core of the notion of punishment. Still, in conversations with empirical researchers, policy makers, and criminal justice practitioners over the years, I have seen up close how unevenly historical scholarship informs their work. They tend to prefer quantitative data, and often are a little suspicious of academic history. One of my economist colleagues admitted to me that she didn't really understand history. Another colleague told a fellow historian at my university that she didn't get race, this, of course, all before this past summer. A senior criminal justice policy official in the Obama administration told me that he didn't have time to read much history. It is clear to me that they are influenced by history in the way that Baldwin described in his 1965 essay, "The White Man's Guilt," which I know frames this series. The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. Their own personal sense of the past most certainly shapes what these empiricists want to study, the theories they apply, how they design their research, what data they create or collect, and how they interpret their findings, and yet some quantitative researchers are either oblivious or duplicitous about how race and racism shape their work. When I asked the leading crime economists at the University of Chicago, who works closely with the Chicago Police Department on various gun violence research initiatives and policy interventions, how he accounted for the Department's enduring problem of racism and police violence, he was speechless. He indicated that race was not central to his work. That surprised me because we spoke in late fall of 2017, not long after the revelations about the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times, and then the officer was recently convicted shortly after this conversation, Jason Van Dyke. When the coverup of McDonald's murder was made public, protesters took to the streets, Black activists helped bring down Police Chief Garry McCarthy, Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez, and, many believe, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who chose not to seek a third term in the 2019 election. Moreover, my conversation with this UFC economist happened just months after Justice Department officials released a damning report on racially discriminatory conduct amongst Chicago Police after the first police brutality reparations payout in American history had been made, 5.5 million dollars to 57 victims of police torture. Going back to the 1970s and lasting until the 1990s, Jon Burge, a Chicago Police Commander and a former military investigator in Vietnam oversaw a midnight crew of officers who extracted false confessions from Black citizens with cattle prods, plastic over the heads, and guns in their mouths. More than 100 individuals were tortured, resulting in 83 million additional dollars in abuse and wrongful conviction settlements. For all that "The Condemnation of Blackness" has to say about the history of weaponized Black crime statistics, racial profiling, and police brutality in Northern cities, it also makes the case that crime did not and does not have to lead to more policing and more punishment. In showing how white liberals used high crime rates among whites in just the opposite way to decriminalize the native, poor, and immigrant, it is possible to see what change looks like using the past. When I've engaged community members, social workers, congressional staffers, and even cops, this is the part of the story that really gets people's attention. It is the least well known and most surprising history. Neither white crime nor violence justified harsh punishment and discrimination in the progressive era. To the contrary, liberal researchers at the time called for less policing and more pro-social interventions. They avoided the language of personal responsibility, they rejected a focus on chastity and morality. They described struggling whites and immigrants as a great army of unfortunates, driven to madness, crime, or suicide by an unfair economic system. "It is the struggle of the masses against the classes," Frederick Hoffman, yes, the same man, insisted, betraying his own racial double standards as the foremost proponent of using crime statistics to justify anti-Black discrimination. These compassionate white researchers and reformers redefined white crime and violence as symptoms of class oppression, and they built on-ramps to higher paying jobs and exit ramps out of poverty. Like the brand new interstate highways leading to the all-white suburbs of the 1950s, progressives paved the way for statistical white flight a generation before. Gang affiliated and criminally involved whites in America's fast-growing intercity slums most certainly heightened public safety concerns at the time. In 1903, a Boston researcher found that the Irish had the highest rates of petty crimes, and the Italians topped the list for major felonies. Chicago's Jane Addams, the most influential social worker and community activist of the early 20th century, witnessed white on white violence daily for decades. After describing the grizzly details of a gang-related shooting where a Polish youth shot the brains out of an Irish boy, Addams wrote, quote, "This tale could be duplicated almost every morning. What might be merely a fight is turned into a tragedy because some boy has a revolver." Another white teenager from, as she describes, "a little farm in Ohio," has shot and killed a policeman while resisting arrest, and was now awaiting the death penalty. A prisoner reentry organization in Chicago focused on the families of the incarcerated by calling attention to the struggles of white mothers who were left to rear their kids alone, and their 1907 annual report is an illustration of a single mother with five small children, standing on the porch of her dilapidated home. She holds an infant in her arms, one child stands behind her, another is at her side, and two are fighting in the street. This white woman lives in a bad neighborhood with broken windows, there's a saloon behind her home, and on the corner is a cop arresting a white male suspect. This is what urban disorder looked like before it was shaded black and brown. Progressives did not fight crime with an early vision of broken windows or stop-and-frisk policing, they focused on root causes. Below the illustration of this broken white family is a caption that speaks for itself, "How criminals are made. So long as there are bad tenements, sweat shops, brutal policemen, bad jails, child labor, dishonest and grinding employers, saloons and gambling dens, so long as boys are taught to fight and allowed to carry firearms, so long as fathers are indifferent deserters and mothers must maintain the family by the washboard, so long crime will continue. What will you do to help this association to prevent it?" In the face of an epidemic of scenes like this one, liberals helped immigrants and poor whites by building a new and improved social and economic infrastructure to support them, new housing, new labor laws, new jobs, and new criminal justice policies, kind of like the defund calls for today. In 1904, 50,000 youth, 90% white, came before Chicago's new juvenile court, the first alternative to incarceration. According to Addams, none of these young people or their parents were to blame for their crimes. As she wrote, "We certainly cannot expect the fathers and the mothers who have come to the city from farms, or who have immigrated from other lands to rectify or to fix these dangers." Personal responsibility was off the table, and abusive police were part of the problem. What happened then to the great grandchildren of those troubled white teens who had come from other lands? To judge by the standards of how Black descendants of the Great Migration are still assessed today, we might ask, how many Italian Americans committed armed robbery last quarter? How about Irish American burglars? Or Polish American drug dealers? The fact is, no one knows, no such data exists anymore. The numbers stopped being relevant when immigrants became white. They still committed crimes, as individuals in all groups do, but when the leading criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, announced in 1934 that the second generation appears to approach the native-born of native parentage in regard to the kinds of crimes committed, he provided the scientific rationale for statistical white flight. From that moment until now, it was no longer possible to use crime statistics to single out the Irish. They were decriminalized as a racial group. They became part of the statistical baseline of a universal white norm. It is that baseline upon which black and brown deviance is measured today. White liberals created a hierarchy in the end that privileged white over black criminals. White people's crimes were a primary reason to help them, it was just the opposite for Black people. Their crimes were used as evidence to contain and control them. Black people were redlined out of the decriminalizing, rehabilitative policies of the progressive era, as well as the New Deal and the post-war suburbs. They were locked into a statistical ghetto that helped to justify the physical one they would fight so hard to escape. History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful political sense. Crime statistics have never been just about behavior, no matter how obvious it may seem that the numbers speak for themselves. They are proxies for beliefs, a way of defining reality and seeing things. Whatever truth they represent in counting actual arrests or real prisoners is itself a reflection of intense social and political struggles. The choice to single out this group or that one in crime data has always been a reflection of ideological and political power, and still is. In the midst of the Trump Administration's early efforts to enact a Muslim travel ban, officials wanted to create new crime data, Section 10 of Executive Order 13769 called for enhanced statistical surveillance of the crimes of certain foreign nationals. No matter how many more white Americans commit acts of domestic terrorism than others, Section 10 was aimed at stigmatizing and banning Muslim immigrants. The same held true in the administration's call for a national emergency at the border. No matter how law abiding immigrants are compared to their native counterparts, Trump officials insisted, based on their own creative math, that Central Americans are a criminal menace. Nearly 50 years ago, at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, the Black novelist and literary critic Albert Murray warned about the dangers and threats of social science data to underwrite the contemporary folklore of racism in the United States based on white norms and black deviations. He cautioned Black people to see the social science statistical survey as the most elaborate fraud in modern times. "African Americans," he added, "should never forget that the group in power is always likely to use every means at its disposal to create the impression that it deserves to be where it is," he insisted, "and it is not above suggesting that those who have been excluded have only themselves to blame." Looking back through the lens of "The Condemnation of Blackness," it is hard to disagree with Murray, but many do, law enforcement especially has doubled down on crime statistics in what is now the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. Old ideas yet again have been programmed into the latest technology. At a 2015 "New York Times" Cities for Tomorrow Conference on the newest advances in technology and data analytics for everything from urban environmental sustainability to crime control, then Police Commissioner William J. Bratton spoke about the New York Police Department's latest crime fighting tool. I sat in the audience, anxious to hear him speak. With a broad smile and supreme confidence, he praised the newest release of the pioneering crime mapping software, known as COMPSTAT, which had been at the heart of stop-and-frisk policing when it began a generation ago. He likened the newest version to the 2002 film, "Minority Report," starring Tom Cruise as head of a special pre-crime unit. Set in Washington, DC in the year 2054, officers gathered intelligence from a trio of pre-cogs, human-like beings who can predict murders and identify killers before they act. Bratton was almost giddy about the comparison, the unintended pun on the film's title seemed to escape him. Two years later at a 2017 Heritage Foundation Summit on "Policing in America, Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future," Bratton gave more details about the architecture of COMPSTAT 2.0. "The software is based on algorithms and advanced data mining techniques we call predictive policing," he said. Effectively, it's the COMPSTAT of the '90s on steroids in the 21st century, and just like all new technology promises, it was guaranteed to be better than before. "It is discriminating, not discriminatory," he bragged. "It is precise, not prejudiced." Until he retired, William Bratton was known as America's top cop, starting his career as a military police officer in Vietnam, and then onto Boston in the 1970s, he spent the next five decades running the biggest and most racially troubled police agencies in the country. Bratton served in six departments coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles, and back to the Big Apple. Several of these departments were subject to federal investigations for police brutality, either before or after he left. Over the years, he developed a strong personal sense of history, covering the entire span of the post-Civil Rights era in policing, but unlike many critics of aggressive policing tactics, Bratton has rarely if ever publicly questioned the value of social science data, except when the research critiqued police racism. In his heritage speech, he celebrated the theoretical founders of broken windows policing. The criminologist George Kelling and the political scientist James Q. Wilson he called "Two personal heroes of mine." He also repudiated the Kerning Commission findings, which he said he had read in 1974 to pass the sergeant's exam for the Police Department. "They believed at the time," and listen carefully, "that the causes of crime were racism, or poverty, or police practices, in many instances, unemployment in demographics. They thought those were the causes, they were not. They are not, and they never have been." Bratton's emphatic dismissal of the Kerner Report and all the published evidence of police bias since demonstrates just how enduring Hoffman's original innovation with racial crime data has been. In this pandemic moment, I think we're able to see more clearly that the very people our many systems were designed, the very people at the heart of the premature death in this moment, both from the pandemics of racist policing and COVID-19, that these mini-systems were designed to minimize their civil rights and civil liberties. These very people who the nation depends upon to keep our hospitals and utilities running and our groceries coming into our home. And yet we know from this history that policing has long been the sharp edge of a political sword used to cut the heart out of Black resistance. Policing is not only repressive, it is causal and symptomatic of the conditions in which violence thrives. The very instrument that we produced as anti-Black racism cannot be the same tool that saves Black people. What this moment leads us to is a crossroads, to define justice beyond a individual case, but to define justice as a form of limiting what police officers have been able to do, which is to protect white privileges in America. Some people call that defunding the police. Some people call it abolition. But what it all means is that there should be less policing of Black America and more investment in the infrastructure of Black communities, just as was true for those European immigrants and native, low-income white Americans so many decades in the making. Thank you very much.
- Well, thank you so much, Professor Muhammad. Your work is so important and it's so powerful. I feel so moved by your words, and I taught your scholarship for a long time now, and hearing it again, I'm reminded of its originality and importance in helping us reframe this moment and understand how we got here. And I have a whole bunch of questions I want to ask, but also bring some in that have come in through the chat. But I think since we ended on police, I actually just want to jump right in to a question on policing. It's so funny, I brought up some statistics from a Gallup poll, so I'm totally uncritical in my own use of statistics. But I thought in this moment, many people who might not have thought about policing or police violence are now alarmed and think that something has gone wrong in American policing to allow this visible unrelenting wave of violence against Black Americans. And a Gallup poll from this summer said that among Black Americans, 88% think that major changes are needed, and among Asian Americans, 82% think that major changes are needed. And perhaps most astonishing, among all racial groups of Americans, 58% of them think that major changes are needed, and another 36% think that minor changes are needed. So only 6% of the people are saying that no change is needed, and I'm wondering, given your knowledge of the long history of policing, from slavery to the present, does this seem like a moment of potential for change? And related to that, would you characterize policing as a system that is currently broken and in need of reform, or that is doing what it was designed to do all along?
- So I think I'd be a fool not to say that that polling data is not encouraging, and evidence of the possibilities for serious transformation of public safety in America. But we know polls are fickle, from '62, the majority of white Americans supported the Civil Rights Movement, and by '66, they said, "We've done enough, it's time to move on." So we shouldn't take much comfort in the way that public opinion can show evidence of willingness to think through things if we don't see the policy apparatus follow soon after. And I think the political marketplace still leaves some doubt in my mind as a historian, what is the appetite, for particularly the Democratic Party, to lead this work? And I guess what would be more hopeful to me, we'd see the evidence of elected officials pursuing real structural changes in terms of the distribution of public dollars away from police to simply do crime control and crime prevention, which is essentially what they do, to addressing public safety through non-law enforcement means. To borrow a term that's becoming more common in some circles, to civilian-ize safety. So I think that until we see more examples of that, I won't hang too much faith on public opinion.
- So you mentioned the need for holding public officials accountable, and related to that, someone has submitted a question, asking how we can hold the U.S. judicial system responsible for the criminalization of Black Americans.
- So I guess that means the role that judges place in adjudicating the merits of the arrests and the prosecution itself, meaning that by some reasonable guess, it appears, in a lot of cases, that a lot of bad justice is being meted out, and so why haven't judges done a better job of dealing with this? Part of that, so I'm filling in the question as I understand it, and I hope that comes close to what the questioner intended, part of this is explained by basically four decades of stripping judges of the discretion to actually judge the merits of individual cases, and that was legislative, and that was state by state and federal. So judges basically had very little discretion once a person had been indicted for a crime, if they were found guilty, a judge could not change the punishment. On the other side of that, the power of prosecutors to compel 95% of criminal defendants to plead out to lesser charges in lieu of lesser jail time also meant that we invested in prosecutors, many of whom are elected. Not all, but most are elected, this incredible discretionary power to saddle people with a lot of potential time, and to withhold exculpatory evidence, even when a defense attorney would have reason to make a stronger argument for an individual's innocence. This is why the notion of collective guilt is so important, because if you look at this whole system from 30,000 feet, in many ways, it doesn't look like it even mattered whether this particular 19-year-old Black kid actually did whatever, somebody's gonna be churned in the system, and that's all that really matters. So I would say that it's really the prosecutors after policing that deserves more scrutiny for how we got to where we are, mass criminalization, because judges simply didn't have the power, as much as they should have, because it was taken away from them.
- So you reviewed a new book by Elliott Currie in "The New York Times," and your analysis in that review is incisive, and I want to pull out a quote from that and then ask a question, and I also think there's another question from the feed that attaches to it nicely. And I think if you take away, I think this is just a really powerful thing for the viewers to grapple with. You said in "The New York Times" recently, quote, "Whether most white Americans admit it or not, they consider Black people both the deserving victims and the dangerous vectors of violence who bear the burden and the blame for much of the nation's exceptional record of death and destruction." And my original question for you was, why is history such a powerful tool in setting that record straight? And someone else's question for you is, what advice do you have to counter arguments that people do throw out with statistics?
- So yeah, I think that I can only say, make a claim like that in light of a very long historical record. And I think part of the critique you heard in my lecture is that it is the deliberate disavowal of this history that is both part of the public's relationship to this past, a denial and a disavowal, and it's also the complicity of the social science community, largely the quantitative scholars who have rejected historical arguments and evidence as a way of contextualizing administrative data, the kind of data that shows up in the census, or in the uniform crime reports, or other things. And so I stand by the statement because I can see that history of denial and disavowal, and the deliberate ignoring of history in terms of empirical research, which really dominates, from a practitioner's standpoint, the policymaking that goes on in the criminal justice system. So people have simply turned away from these histories, as if they don't matter to the world that we actually live in, which is why the Bratton quote is so powerful when he's delivering the speech as kind of the apex of his career, saying, "Looking back, Kerner was wrong." I mean, that's incredible. There is no way to minimize the role of Bratton as a singular figure in the history of policing for the past 50 years who is on the record saying Kerner got it wrong, this has always been about criminals, and not about a system. So that, to me, is evidence. That's the footnote in "The New York Times" book review to the whether white Americans admit it on not because certainly Bratton sits inside of that space. I think you had a part two question, or a second part of that-
- Well, I was kind of giving all the credit to history as the vehicle for smashing these myths, but one of our viewers said, well, how else, do you have any other advice for countering-
- Oh, yeah.
- These arguments and myths based in statistics, maybe for someone who's not historically inclined, but has a different toolkit that they can draw on.
- Yeah, so Jen knows this from the review. I mean, the book itself is, both redefines the statistics as the facts, in a way, but also points to the problem that, it's not so much winning an argument about the truth of the statistics, it's what they mean. And so when I tell the story of high rates of criminal victimization in white communities, what I'm telling you is that people use the evidence of criminal, the numbers, as a way of saying, we gotta help people. We have to do something beyond policing because policing is not helping the situation. So that's what defund is really about. I mean, to turn away from the echo there, for Black activists, to say, we don't have to have an argument here about whether Black people actually do harm or not in their own communities, the only question is whether police are actually helping to minimize the harm, or are contributing to it. And then in the absence of a question about whether the police, the role they play or not, are all these other systems that we know were built to minimize Black life in a healthy, productive way, and so why can't we focus on those things, why can't we reinvest in those things? So that's what I would say. The easy quip, of course, is to point out that an opioid epidemic brings with it lots of crime and mayhem, and yet the public health response to it has been the dominant narrative, as compared to the crack epidemic. A lot of white Americans may convince themselves that we've learned from our mistake, but if that were true, we certainly wouldn't have a Republican president in office promising more law and order, and to protect white people from the suburbs, if some percentage of Americans still didn't believe that Black people deserve more punishment for their drug addictions, and white people deserve public health.
- Thank you, I want to stay on history for a second, but also connect it to capitalism. In the much celebrated and also now controversial 1619 Project, you contributed an essay on sugar, that characterized sugar as the white gold that fueled slavery. You detailed the violence and profitability of sugar plantations, especially in the antebellum era Louisiana, and wrote, quote, "Most of these stories of brutality, torture, and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of southern folklore," end quote. Well, I cut you off, obviously, I ended your quote prematurely. But again and again, we see history weaponized as a tool of white supremacy, and I just wonder, when you think back over the field of African American history that you, your mentors, and your mentors' mentors have built over the last 50 or so years, where would you... are we winning this fight over history?
- Well, we're certainly making progress. I mean, that I do truly believe. I think that, one, I'll say that the explosion of historical fine art informed by history, like the work of Kara Walker, or Hank Willis Thomas, the photographer, are part of a broader moment over the past 20 years, Steve McQueen's work in "12 Years a Slave." A generation of artists and writers and creatives and scholars have revisited slavery with fresh eyes, with different perspectives, and have created a, I believe, a younger generation of people who have much greater awareness. The reach of Ava DuVernay's "13th" cannot be overstated. It is a brilliant work of documentary, even with its flaws, I mean, there are scholarship flaws in it, but as a matter of a work of creativity, it's incredible. And so I'd say acknowledging that work and then 1619 suggests to me an arc of change, and a mark of possibility that one can also measure in the resistance to it. The President's call for patriotic education is evidence that all this work has hit a nerve. And so the goal is to keep forging ahead.
- Before we end this wonderful conversation, I want to totally go in a different direction, if you will, come to me and talk about higher ed and this new project that you're involved in. Can we go there, is that-
- Very quickly, yeah.
- Oh, okay, so let me explain it to the, so I recently learned that Professor Muhammad is the Faculty Director of Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project at Harvard's Kennedy School, where you are investigating the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion efforts in some private organizations, and also nonprofits, and where claims of diversity and inclusion or equity and belonging seem to fall short, and also what models work. And I know the project's in an early stage, but I'm wondering if you would share with us any preliminary findings or insights, especially as it pertains to higher education.
- Yeah, so actually, the work itself grows out of serving for a year and a half at Harvard on a university-wide Diversity Committee with Mahzarin Banaji, who is the co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, and Frank Dobbin, who is a sociologist who studies private sector diversity efforts. And we learned a lot working together as a threesome to sort of report back to Harvard. So I'll just, I'll mention two important findings, of which also informed the Theory of Change and the IARA Project, which is what I call this work. The first is that if leadership is not fully committed, it's not gonna happen. Too often, leadership is outsourced, the responsibility to a CDO, a chief diversity officer, and then moved onto the real business of the firm, the university, the organization, et cetera. And so what we know is that if the leadership signals to the senior leadership that this is not really their responsibility and it's on the CDO or it's on the people who do the diversity work, then it is doomed to fail, period. The second thing that we've learned is that every process of organizational change requires some socialization process, which is to say there must be some collective accounting for why we're doing this work. Too often, directives have come down, we've got trainings to impose, we've got a guest speaker here, you should attend, and that, in many cases, we've learned backfires, and the representational goals around diversity often flat line or diminish. So there has to be a process whereby people who are skeptical are included, as well as people who are converted, and through that process, you can arrive at implementation of policy changes that people may not entirely agree with, but feel like their voices have been heard. So I'll stop there because we're still learning, and there's a lot to share, and it's complicated. But those are two important things that a lot of places do not do.
- Thank you so much for all of your insights in such a wide ranging conversation. It's been a real pleasure.
- Thanks for having me.
- Muhammad and Manion for that really intriguing conversation. I mean, the sweep of the history was amazing, and then it sort of got down to this what I thought this really striking contrast between the crack crisis and the opioid crisis, where you really kind of zero in on sort of this whole story, and how that's one way that it ends, which is just completely fascinating. A few reminders before we close, if you are a seminar participant, please remember to sign up for discussion section. You should have gotten an email to remind you to sign up. Thank you to everyone tonight for joining us this evening and for you engagement with this lecture series. The last lecture in the series will be by Elizabeth Hinton of Yale University. Professor Hinton will talk about "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime." That lecture will take place on Tuesday, November 17th, at 5:00 pm, please join us for that lecture. Thanks again to professors Muhammad and Professor Manion, and good night, everyone. Have a great evening.