Harvard University Press Blog

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1932 that “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.” Last year we asked Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness and Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, whether the statement still characterizes life in America:

Do I think that a statement like that holds true, even to this day? Yes. If I were to give the glib, short answer: yes. And it comes in many forms. One form is the case of New York, where we know explicitly about a policy like stop-and-frisk. A policy like that exists on the rationale that, in black and brown communities, you’ll find the most street level crime, mostly revolving around drugs or contraband guns, and so those communities should be subjected to extreme forms of surveillance, like stopping and searching people, frisking them. That is a form of accusation, the very form of surveillance and policing in those communities is, in effect, taking individual black and brown young men, and accusing them of potential criminality. There is something about the ability and the willingness for us as a society to accept that kind of treatment of young black men whose innocence should be presumed, and not in question, when they are encountered on the streets.

The statistics on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy are staggering, with the New York Times reporting that in 2011 the NYPD stopped people 685,724 times, and that 88% of those stopped were not arrested or even ticketed. And 87% of those stopped were Black or Latino.

Scrutiny of the policy is at a high, with the NAACP organizing a silent march to protest stop-and-frisk in NYC this Sunday, June 17th. As the NAACP explains, silent marches have a tradition that dates back to 1917, when Du Bois led the organization’s first major public protest and demonstrated the power of thousands of people marching silently through the streets:

Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of non-violent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents. On June 17, we will hold up a mirror to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. It is not only discriminatory, it actively seeks to humiliate innocent citizens—particularly African American and Latino men—and criminalize otherwise legal behavior.
 
Right now in our nation’s most diverse city, NYPD officials are legally empowered to stop and pat down any individual based on nothing more than their own suspicion. In 2009, the most common justification for a stop was a vague category called “furtive movements.”

The result? Blacks and Latinos are nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by police, and the searches overwhelmingly target young men of color. In one eight-block area of an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police made 52,000 stops over a four-year period—an average of nearly one stop per resident each year.

And the vast majority of those stopped are innocent. In 2011, the NYPD stopped and questioned 685,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 605,000 walked away with no charges—only a feeling of humiliation and anger.

 People of color should not be afraid to walk down the street in their own city. On June 17th, we will proudly walk with them to assert that right. Like thousands of activists before us, we will channel the power of our silence to bring public attention to the use of racial profiling by the New York Police Department.

Also this week, the Times released a short documentary, The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk, focused on a young man in Brooklyn who says he was stopped more than 60 times before age 18. It’s a powerful story:

 

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

Two Takes on Two Migrations

Earlier this fall we published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz. The book is a deeply researched examination of the legal machinations that have left the United States with a criminal justice system that seems no longer to be ruled by law. Writing in the New York Review of Books, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens praised Stuntz for accurately describing “the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans,” and described the book as containing “a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement.”

Stuntz opens the book with a chapter titled “Two Migrations,” in which he considers the massive influx of European immigrants to the United States in the seventy years after World War I together with the northern migration of African Americans in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The two migrations had many structural similarities, and both triggered urban crime waves, which Stuntz notes is mostly to be expected: “Millions of mostly poor young men uprooted from their homes and moving into crowded slums sounds like a recipe for violence and lawlessness.” But, despite their similarities, Stunts shows that the crime waves actually differed enormously; the first was “short-lived and mild,” the second “long-lasting and severe.”

Comparing these two situations is an incredibly complicated exercise, and Stuntz’s willingness and ability to accept the challenge of such complexity is central to the accomplishment of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Of the many factors he points to in his consideration of the differing outcomes of these two migrations, one to which he gives great weight is the discrepancy between the political accomplishments of European immigrants and African American migrants: “By the late nineteenth century—when crime in immigrant-dominated cities was mostly falling, not rising—working-class immigrants and their offspring largely governed the justice system that governed them. Even today, African Americans have no such power.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, newly available in paperback, also addresses the differing outcomes of these two migrations. The book chronicles the emergence of a now-deeply embedded cultural notion of African American criminality, one that Muhammad shows to have grown from a dangerously misguided reliance on statistical “evidence.” He contrasts the treatment of African Americans in the urban North to that of working-class whites and European immigrants, and, like Stuntz, helps us to understand how those historical episodes continue to shape our society. 

Stuntz’s book, while wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, is based in his work as a legal scholar; Muhammad’s reflects his training as a historian, and his deep interest in the social sciences. Where Stuntz gives a focus on legal developments and statistical comparison, Muhammad sifts through the cultural and scholarly discourse surrounding those developments and statistics. And for Muhammad, a key to understanding the differing criminal patterns of these two migrations is the fact that the sociological establishment mobilized itself to argue for the integration of European immigrants, but left African Americans out of that effort, believing as they did that black people committing crimes were merely reflecting either their cultural or racial inferiority, and that sociological resources shouldn’t be wasted on them. As Muhammad explained it to us in a recent conversation:

By and large, the entire edifice of sociology (was) deploying its resources against eugenics and Social Darwinism to say that immigrants are not infecting American society with their degenerate blood… “They’re providing real energy and effort to our labor pool, they’re helping us build America. And that some of them should fall into a life of crime is more our fault than theirs, because we haven’t given them a fair opportunity. We stigmatize them, and our nativist proclivities make it very difficult for immigrants to live the lives that they came here to pursue.” And basically they never put black people into that equation. They left black people out of that kind of very structuralist, environmental critique of the origins of white European or white ethnic criminality.

You can hear Muhammad make that point and others in the video below.

 

So in the comparison of these two migrations, where Stuntz shows us political advancement for European immigrants and subsequent demographic shifts that largely prevented African Americans from making similar gains, Muhammad highlights a formidable social apparatus undergirding the rise of one group and helping to maintain the lower status of the other.

These two books, covering similar ground in different ways, help to remind us how important it is to reach across disciplinary lines in our attempts to understand the world in which we live. 

An Interview with Schomburg Center Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Late last year Khalil Gibran Muhammad was selected as the new Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Muhammad is also the author of The Condemnation of Blackness, a widely praised study of how the idea (rather than the reality) of black criminality has shaped modern urban America. His tenure at the Schomburg begins this summer, and Muhammad discussed his goals in a recent conversation with Tavis Smiley that you can watch below.

As Muhammad makes clear in the interview, there are definite challenges involved in taking over this storied center for documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent at this moment when it’s often suggested that we’ve reached some post-racial plateau. From the interview transcript:

I have serious concerns about a level of anti-intellectualism in this country and a kind of post-racial zeitgeist that both work against the interests of an institution dedicated to Black history in culture.

So on one hand, a lot of people read less and care less about the minutia of the past or really to appreciate learning the details of one’s culture or one’s society. On another hand, the notion of post-racialism finds us repeatedly asking every February is Black History Month necessary any longer.

So the idea that somehow we could arrive at a point in America’s history where we don’t actually interrogate the experiences of races in this country through the lens of both the African American experience and the diasporic experience of people of African ancestry is as ridiculous as no longer finding the Revolutionary period important to understanding what this country is about.

So my commitment is to making sure that the young people, the 5 to 15-year-olds, have a place at the Schomburg because I see them as the people that I need to invest in and to encourage stakeholders for the future of the institution.

In their conversation Smiley and Muhammad also discussed how the beating of Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson drew Muhammad to the subject of history as a college student; the legacy he carries as the great-grandson of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad; and what he brings to the Schomburg as its first Director to come straight from academia. It’s a lively conversation with a young historian whose eye to the future promises to turn the Schomburg Center into an even more exciting and valuable resource.

The interview begins after a brief ad:

Watch the full episode. See more Tavis Smiley.

 

 

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

In New York City during the 1920s, an employee of the New York Clearing House, an august downtown financial institution composed of the city’s elite banks, would descend every day and mark three numbers on a chalkboard, each of which was meant as a general economic indicator to be used by the financial industry. Two of these numbers were immediately copied down by a different sort of employee and phoned uptown to a different sort of bank, one whose doings possessed a good deal more relevance for the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who had recently transformed the sleepy neighborhood of Harlem into a budding “black metropolis.” The uptown bankers, known colloquially as “kings” and “queens,” dealt not in stocks and bonds but in millions of paper slips, each one marked in pencil and each one representing a one, five, or maybe a ten-cent bet placed by a resident on the outcome of a three-digit number derived via a set formula from that day’s Clearing House results. “Playing the numbers” was a cultural institution in Harlem, one that about half the neighborhood’s population seems to have engaged in each day, one that tied them in strange ways to the city’s licit economy, but one that has been strangely understudied by scholars, who in the past have trained their focus largely on the high-cultural manifestations of Harlem’s remarkable flowering.

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars takes a different tack, utilizing the authors’ remarkable research to tell a story that illuminates the lives of the ordinary Harlemites who most often form little more than a colorful backdrop to accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. For a dozen years the “numbers game” was one of America’s rare black-owned businesses, turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. The astronomical success of “bankers” like Stephanie St. Clair and Casper Holstein attracted Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, and organized crime, fresh off Prohibition and in need of a new hustle, to the game. By the late 1930s, most of the profits were being siphoned out of Harlem. All in all, Playing the Numbers reveals a unique dimension of African American culture that made not only Harlem but New York City itself the vibrant and energizing metropolis it was.

Interestingly, the authors of Playing the Numbers are four Australian academics who received a grant from their government to research this remarkable phenomenon. You can get a taste of the data itself on a quite innovative website they've produced called Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930, which won the Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History this year from the American Historical Association.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad on WBAI "Talkback!"

A fantastic interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad on his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, in which he seeks to expose the “glue that binds crime to race”—the logic by which we in America are able to convince ourselves that “whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals":

 

Khalil Gibran Muhammad - WBAI "Talkback!" March 3, 2010

The interview aired on WBAI New York's "Talkback!" program with host Hugh Hamilton. You can hear Professor Muhammad discuss his book in person *this Saturday* at 2pm at Harlem's Hue-Man Bookstore (directions here).

"Whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals"

Just in from the printer—a book that Glenn Loury has called “the most significant work in the study of race and American society to have appeared in the past decade.” It's called The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, and it's a book in which author Khalil Gibran Muhammad has set out to expose the “glue that binds crime to race”—the logic by which we in America are able to convince ourselves that “whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals.” That last phrase comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, who upon reading Muhammad's book pronounced it a “mandatory read.”

During Reconstruction, Muhammad explains, as four million formerly-enslaved blacks were “transformed from property to human beings to would-be citizens of the nation,” what had been the “slavery problem” underwent a dramatic paradigm shift. With slavery dismantled, what white Americans had now was a “Negro problem”—a new set of anxieties surrounding the question of whether and how blacks would assume their place as co-equal citizens in a modern democracy. For answers as to what degree of citizenship could safely be afforded what one social scientist called “the strangers in our midst,” many influential Americans looked to the emerging social sciences, whose practitioners, holders of prestigious chairs in the nation’s top universities, utilized newly-available forms of census data to update for a modern and “scientific” age forms of racial knowledge that in the days of slavery had remained ad hoc, anecdotal, and unsystematic. Among the most enduring legacies of this social-scientific study of blacks in America was the putative link forged between blackness and criminality. Backed by the weight of statistical “truth” and attributed ultimately to blacks’ innate inferiority—for in the land of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain high black arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons?—the truism of black criminality became, in Muhammad’s words, “one of the most widely accepted bases for justifying prejudicial thinking, discriminatory treatment, and/or racial violence as an instrument of public safety.”

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.

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

|| NB: The photo on the jacket, taken by Richard Hoe Lawrence and depicting what was called "A Downtown Morgue," was included in Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, which we happen to be issuing in a brand-new John Harvard Library edition this April. The new edition will include all of Riis' pioneering photos—we were able to make prints from his originals, which live in the archives at the Museum of the City of New York.

Paris, 1530

The city of Paris as it might have looked to a medieval pigeon. To be found, along with nine other maps and hundreds of edifying photos, in our newly-released Paris from the Ground Up, and printed there courtesy of the wonderful Harvard Map Collection at Harvard College Library. For those keeping score, this is Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's Lvtetia vulgari nomine Paris, published in this form in 1572. Click the image for a larger version.

Hong Kong not really that generic

A review of Leo Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong from the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Rem Koolhaas would call Hong Kong a generic city; Lee acknowledges that his adopted hometown fits the bill, but only to a degree. City Between Worlds is an attempt to find the local in this most global of cities:

Working in the shadow of these two brilliant theoreticians [Ackbar Abbas and Koolhaas], I find myself plowing away just to pick up some piece of empirical debris or the occasional relic — a few small cultural substances from Hong Kong’s streets and from the material world of its everyday people. “Re-searching” this quotidian culture is not a useless gesture, in my view. I share the sentiments of another local researcher, Jason Wordie: “Wandering about Hong Kong Island’s backstreets . . . one can sometimes feel like an archaeologist of the modern day working without a shovel, piecing together isolated fragments from what was here until almost yesterday to build up a picture of a very different sort.” As a longtime Hong Kong citizen himself, Wordie laments the forgetfulness of Hong Kong’s residents about their own past.

That's from the Prologue; if you'd like to check out the rest and learn about the theoretical underpinnings (and/or lack thereof) employed, click here to read the whole thing.

A bonus -- two classic views of Hong Kong from the Kowloon Peninsula, across the bay from the island proper.

Hong Kong then:

From Thomas Allem, China in a Series of Views (1843).
Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.

And now:

Hong Kong skyline in 2007. Photo by Clifford Boehmer.

Libraries embrace street lit; finger waggers wag, but readers keep reading

Today's New York Times informs us that urban libraries like the one headed by Shonda Miller in Far Rockaway, Queens, have begun to embrace what's variously known as  "urban fiction," "street lit" or "gangsta lit," a genre that sprang up during the 1990s and which chronicles the (glamorized) trials and tribulations of urban black life in America's cities. Pimps, hustlers, dealers, and madams populate the pages of these fast-moving novels -- take, for example, Angel, protagonist of the wildly popular eponymous novel set in this blogger's own hometown, is according to the Times "a Versace-clad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here." Toni Morrison it's not, but is that the point?

The point, librarians say, is that people are reading. People who have never seen the inside of a library in their lives, they report, come in asking for Teri Woods, Kwame Teague, and other street lit luminaries, whose tales of lurid urban doings speak to phenomena with which many patrons are sadly familiar in their daily lives. Some librarians see the genre as a sort of gateway drug into further reading; Vanessa Morris, a professor at Drexel who started a book club in North Philadelphia, has seen her teenage pupils branch out from street lit into more "credible" genres like straightforward biography. At Far Rockaway, once the librarians have got their hooks into kids weaned on the drugs-and-guns glamor of street lit, they use it as an opportunity to push the hard stuff on them -- "If you want sex, dirt and murder, read Shakespeare!" says Sharon Anderson, the head librarian there.