“Long before the late-model black drug dealer became public enemy number one, white bootleggers, drug pushers, pimps, common thieves, and thugs plied their trade in black communities alongside their black peers, but with the police on their side. Thoughtful, well-funded crime prevention and politically accountable crime fighting secured immigrants’ whiteness, in contrast to the experiences of blacks, who were often brutalized or left unprotected and were repeatedly told to conquer their own crime before others would help them.”—Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Dr. Muhammad is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former professor of African-American history at Indiana University. Join him on October 5, 2011 to kickoff a new season at the Schomburg Center.
