Khalil Muhammad, an assistant professor of history at Indiana University, argued last night that past discourses on black criminality have delayed black Americans' social development and integration.
The talk in Goddard Chapel was the first of the Gill Lecture Series, a collection of three speeches commemorating the late Associate Professor of History Gerald Gill. A popular man among faculty members and students, Gill passed away unexpectedly last summer at the age of 58.
Muhammad's lecture was entitled, "Discourses on the Black Criminality in the Making of the Segregated Urban North." It focused on criticizing the work of Frederick Hoffman, a statistician from the post-Civil War era who studied society in the 1890s. Hoffman used his findings to justify claims that blacks were naturally inclined toward unlawful activity.
Muhammad explained the frustratingly persistent nature of the subject of black criminality. "We live with the legacies of the past. This is the most important thing I want you to take away from today," he said.
Muhammad is the author of "From Migrant to Menace: Criminalization of African Americans."
Tufts' fledgling Gill Lecture Series is sponsored by Provost Jamshed Bharucha and the Department of History.
"I'm constantly amazed at the number of alumni from a number of different eras who cite Professor Gill as the person who has had the greatest impact on them while they were students at Tufts," Bharucha said before Muhammad took the podium.
Muhammad told the audience that the story of the discourse on black criminality begins with the birth of modern crime statistics after the Civil War. "There was tremendous disagreement and tremendous sectional strife" as a result of the war, which made it difficult for freed slaves to find their place in the political economy, he said. This prompted scientific investigation into racial differences.
Muhammad maintained that most of the discourse began with the 1890 U.S. Census, which documented 95 percent of the black population. "It is in that moment that we begin to see the emergence of a statistical discourse about African-American criminality," Muhammad said.
In several works published during the 1890s, Hoffman used the statistical method to prove his conclusions were true. "This was a national study arguing in unequivocal language that African Americans were indeed a criminal race," Muhammad said of Hoffman's 1896 book "The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro."
Using statistics such as the mortality rate of blacks in the South, which was twice that of whites, Hoffman erroneously concluded that blacks were both anatomically and morally inferior, Muhammad said. Furthermore, he proposed that the black race was on the road to extinction, and that the best solution to the question of its role in society was simply to do nothing.
Yet at the same time, Hoffman attributed high levels of suicide among whites to societal deficiency, not racial traits. "Hoffman interpreted whites' self-destructive behavior as a result of a diseased society," Muhammad said. He added that Hoffman proposed that everything possible be done about the white problem, but nothing at all about the black problem.
According to Muhammad, Hoffman effectively made it impossible to read statistics without connecting crime with race. "Hoffman wrote crime into race and centered it at the heart of the Negro problem," he said.
After Hoffman's reports were released, critics responded with outrage and ambivalence, but the long-term effects of the discourse were disastrous, Muhammad said.
When Hoffman's discourse converged with similar discussions among northern liberals in the early 19th century, black social development was effectively delayed by an entire generation, the professor said.
