It was all a set up to make all Black males appear to be criminals. There must be something wrong with us. The fact is that there is nothing wrong with Black men. Everyone needs more money, more education, better health, deeper understanding. Khalil Gibran Muhammed argues in his book, The Condemnation of Blackness, that African-Americans were systematically condemned as criminal and inferior without being allowed the opportunity to prove otherwise. The amazing thing is the degree of success many African-Americans have enjoyed despite being vilified.
Interview with the author: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-confronting-the-contradictions-of-america%E2%80%99s-past/
From: Harvard University Press Blog
http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2010/01/whites-commit-crimes-but-black-males-are-criminals.html
"In The Condemnation of Blackness, Muhammad shows how “the racial data revolution” was made to work against blacks even as social scientists, journalists, and reformers created pathways to rehabilitation for Irish, Italian, and other foreign-born immigrants once tagged with a similar stigma of criminality. Where white criminals enjoyed the privilege of “racial anonymity” and were afforded an understanding of the structural roots of poverty and crime, black criminals, whose crimes, we can now see, differed little in form and function from those committed by whites, were made to stand in for the imagined deficiencies of the race as a whole, so that in evaluations of black fitness for modern life, the innocent came to be tarred along with the actually guilty. “Whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals”—in exposing the roots of this persistent refrain, one that has justified not only racial violence but the kind of benign neglect that has relegated blacks to the margins of an American social sphere that has historically expanded to incorporate new and different groups, Muhammad shows how this particular mismeasure of man has become foundational to our thinking about modern urban America, and how its insidious logic remains with us to this day."
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