The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

For the Ages: A History Podcast

While institutional and systemic racism is well documented in the Postbellum and Reconstruction South, its effects on African Americans in the Northern United States, as well as how those practices have shaped contemporary society, is often less understood. Scholar and historian Khalil Gibran Muhammed sits down with David M. Rubenstein to shine a light on the 19th and 20th century manipulation of racial crime statistics that has erroneously guided much of American public policy—influencing everything from education to incarceration—for over a century, tracing our nation’s codified persecution of African Americans from slavery through the Great Migration and beyond.
Recorded on December 21, 2023