Moyers & Company; 132; Confronting the Contradictions of America's Past

This week, a mortgage company wants to put a time in America. History is the building block of all knowledge in our society, and it is the most important part of the most significant tradition that human beings have, which is storytelling. Everything is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colbert Foundation, Independent Production Fund, with support from the Partridge Foundation, a John and PolyGuth Charitable Fund, the Clements Foundation, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Herbalpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.

More information at macfound.org and gummerwits. The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, the HKH Foundation, Barbara G. Flashman, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. Welcome. This is, once again, Public Television's Pledge Time. When we remind you that there's nowhere else on your TV dial that you can see programs like the one you're watching now, please take a moment to contribute to your local station. Congress is in the midst of its summer recess, escaping the malaria heat of the Washington Swampland and the agony of legislative gridlock. Most of the members fled for home, but many have run straight into the arms of angry voters questioning whether the incumbent should be returned to office. The clamor and descent remind us of another hot and humid summer, 236 years ago, when

the Second Connital Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, and riders on horseback rushed it to the far corners of the 13 new United States. It was read aloud to cheering crowds. Perhaps we will remember the Declaration of Independence itself. The product of what John Adams called Thomas Jefferson's Happy Talent for Composition. Take some time this week to read it, along to yourself, are aloud with others, and tell me the words aren't still capable of setting the mind ablaze. The founders surely knew that when they let these ideas loose in the world, they could never again be caged. Yet from the beginning, these sentiments were also a thorn in our side, a reminder of the new nation's divided soul. Opponents who still sided with Britain greeted it with sarcasm. How can you declare all men are created equal without freeing your slaves? Jefferson himself was an aristocrat whose inheritance of 5,000 acres and the slaves to work

at mocked his eloquent notion of equality. Take knowledge that slavery degraded master and slave alike, but would not give his own slaves their freedom. Their labor kept him financially afloat. Hundreds of slaves forced like beast of burden to toil from sunrise to sunset on the threat of the lash, enabled him to thrive as a privileged gentleman to pursue his intellectual interest and to rise in politics. Even the children born to him by the slave-sally himmings remain slaves as did their mother, only an obscure provision in his will release their children after his death. All the others, scores of slaves, were sold to pay off his debts. Yes, Thomas Jefferson possessed a happy talent for composition, but he employed it for cross purposes. Whenever he was thinking when he wrote all men are created equal, he also believed blacks were inferior to whites.

Inferior he wrote to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. To read his argument today is to interonce again the pathology of white superiority that attended the birth of our nation. So forcefully did he stake the case and so great was his standing among the slave-holding class that after his death the black abolitionist David Walker would claim Jefferson's argument had injured us more and has been as great a barrier to our emancipation as anything that has ever been advanced against us. For it had sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites and never will be removed this side of eternity. So the ideal of equality Jefferson proclaimed he also betrayed. He got it right when he wrote about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the core of our human aspirations, but he lived it wrong, denying to others the rights he claimed for himself.

And that's how Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, came to embody the oldest and longest war of all, the war between the self and the truth, between what we know and how we live. In the eloquent words of the Declaration were human beings as flawed and conflicted as they were inspired. If they were to look up on us today, they most likely would think as they did then how much remains to be done. With those contradictions of American history in mind, this seemed a good time to talk with Khalil Gibran, Muhammad. He's made them, his lives were. He grew up on Chicago's south side, a member of the first generation of African Americans born after the victories of the civil rights movement. He's the author of this acclaimed book, The Condemnation of Blackness, which brings the past to barrel race, crime and the making of urban America and connects today's headlines to their deep roots. He was teaching history at Indiana University when the New York Public Library asked him to

head the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I decided right after college that there was nothing more important to me than learning about African American history and culture, really being able to learn firsthand the experiences and contributions that African Americans have made to this country and to the world. The Schomburg Center has known the world over for documenting the history of all peoples of African descent with a special emphasis on the story of African Americans. Among its 10 million items are classic works, crystallizing that experience. I asked Muhammad to talk about how we tell America's story without whitewashing the past. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Bill, for having me. Why history? I asked the question because Henry Ford famously said history is bunk. That's right. And you clearly disagree. I clearly disagree. And I think this is a moment with questions about what the founding fathers intended when

they established our system of government, how large it should be, the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about whether there should be central government or small country of farmer republics. This question of what our original history is has shaped almost every aspect of the American experience. In other words, history is all around us. Whether or not it is an accurate description of what happened in 1776, for example, or what happened in 1865 is secondary to the point that people's ideas about the past, people since of memory about the past, shape their own sense of identity and shape how they imagined the world should be. And therefore, in my opinion, history is the building block of all knowledge in our society. And it is the most important part of the most significant tradition that human beings have,

which is storytelling. But how do we know to trust the past, or which part of the past to trust? Because as you say, history is storytelling. And we all tend to reach for the facts that confirm our story, confirm our narrative, our interpretation of the past. So how do we learn to trust which part of the past? Historians, professional historians, will be the first to admit that history is about interpretation. It's about taking a fragmentary record and crafting an argument and defending that argument based on evidence. It's very little different than what lawyers do or Supreme Court justices do when they try to argue the merits of a case. But when you hear someone in vote, Thomas Jefferson, what image comes to mind? I tend to think of Jefferson's ideas that gave birth to this republic with a whole lot of contradiction.

And in that regard, I don't think of Thomas Jefferson as exceptional. The fundamental conundrum that was established in this country in spite of Thomas Jefferson's ideas about independence was that they resolved that slavery would exist after the revolution. And I asked, well, I asked that question because it raises the argument, the story which do you believe, of whether this reflected their hypocrisy or their humanity. And therefore is an eternal reality that we want to do good things and we believe certain ideas and ideals, but we also act otherwise. So it does. Contradiction is part of the human experience. We wrestle with it every single day, whether we admit it or not. Thomas Jefferson and many of half of the other slaveholders who were presidents all lived daily contradictions. They could literally look out their windows and see enslaved people in the land of the free and the home of the brave, so on and so forth.

But the fact of the matter is that they had a great responsibility for building what would become American democracy. And in that regard, they failed miserably. It took me a long time, long past college and even graduate school, to figure out that eight of the first ten of our presidents were enriched by their ownership of capital land, Orslay. We were never taught that these men actually created a government, a constitution designed to protect the further acquisition of property for the privileged classes. That just didn't get discussed. Well, it's also the difference between an individual living in contradiction in terms of enslaving another as a proponent of freedom and the ways in which those same individuals help to build philosophical and ideological justifications for enslavement. And again, that's where things get a little trickier.

So of course, Thomas Jefferson penned notes on the state of Virginia in 1787, which was effectively one of the first scientific arguments for why black people should be treated differently from whites by virtue of their racial inferiority. In other words, the scientific notion that black people were fundamentally different, whether it was in hair texture or in body odor, which is all part of Thomas Jefferson's analysis, gave birth to the enduring justification that even in America, even in a place that represented a tradition of republicanism in the world, the first modern democracy, that you could actually reconcile freedom and slavery as long as the people who were enslaved were not equal citizens, were not made of the stuff of equal humanity. Well, then you had to construct a system that made sure they could never be seen to be equal members of society.

Correct. Well, that system was already self-reinforcing by the economic imperatives of enslavement. So you had the system that provided a modus operandi for reproducing inferiority, but you had to explain it still. And it was to that task that theologians, philosophers, scientists, eventually social scientists, journalists and politicians eventually weighed in and said, this all makes sense. It makes sense because these people, I mean, and from a religious standpoint, these people are not of the same God, even, that they represent a different species created by God to serve white men. If you can remember, when you first heard the words, all men are created equal, do you remember how you reacted to the... When I was old enough, in particular in college, when these kinds of documents, you have time to critically engage, you're being inspired to pay attention, I can remember having a visible, a palpable sense that this wasn't true, that the framers had lied, that the

words didn't match the reality, and that was just a response. I didn't have a sense of history enough in to sort of unpack all of that, because there was so much rhetoric of equality of opportunity. I mean, I can't overemphasize the point enough, I grew up in the 1980s, right? So, this is, you know, John Wayne is the president, as Ronald Reagan, and in all of that rhetoric of opportunity, all of the sanitization of what King's legacy meant was part of the zeitgeist of that moment. And so, to all of a sudden encounter, those words in a moment of reflection, and then to know growing up on the south side of Chicago that everything wasn't all perfect and equal, and that there was work to be done, there was a reconciliation, a reckoning, so to speak, that needed to take place.

And for me, that was exciting, it was exciting to have the space and the opportunity when I got to graduate school to study it. Again, it took me a long time to learn that the man who wrote all men accrued equal also wrote the words, money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations. And so, I ask you the historian, is one more true than the other? Is it more true that all men are created equal, or is it more true that money, not morality, governs our polity? Well, if we use the benefit of hindsight, I think it's certainly, history has borne out that money, not morality, is the principle of commercialized nations. At the very moment, of course, when this country was building its political infrastructure, the set of ideas that would animate three systems of government, which checks and balances, would define citizenship, of course, property was crucial to who would participate. And so, it took us another 100 years to enfranchise black male voters, and then another 50 years after that to enfranchise women.

So, in that regard, history teaches us something about what the relationship between citizenship and property was, which was a contradiction, it wasn't about all men, and then that regard even the gendered notion of equality. We, the people, did not include women, blacks, women, Native Americans, which is, even in this conversation, and let me say this very clearly, the fact of what happened to Native Americans in this country in the 17th century, the fact that it's still not part of the lingua franca of our conversations about this nation's earliest history is evidence of how little it is part of our secondary educational experiences and our colleges. In other words, I am obviously a proponent of historical literacy that focuses in particular on African Americans, but even as I talk to you, even as we have this conversation about the Declaration of Independence, it's almost an afterthought to think about Native Americans. It's almost an afterthought to think about how the 19th century, the moment of the expansion

of the frontiers of this nation, which really was an escape valve for European immigrants who came here, whether it was from Ireland or whether they came here from Australia as in English indentures, was built on the backs of land owned in the Indian sense by many tribes, indigenous to this country, I mean it just, it's just a moment to reflect upon how just starting with the question of what happened to black people is not sufficient to understanding that at the end of the day, the very notion of settlement in this country was about procuring resources for the purposes of wealth accumulation. That was true for most who came to this country, maybe not true for a small band of Puritans who landed in Massachusetts who imagined the recreation of a very special religious community, but even that vision of American society didn't last very long.

So it's certainly true as far as I'm concerned that over the last 225 years, Thomas Jefferson's second point about money has far outlasted and triumphed over the notion of freedom. The declaration refers to Native Americans as savages. They were written out as you say of the story very early. Do you think it had something to do with the unconscious or even conscious understanding on the part of the white slave holding, property seeking race that we were practicing genocide? We, the white race, we're practicing genocide against these people, maybe the word wasn't encouraged at that time, but they were removed, they were taken to a reservation, they were enclosed, and that's where they spent the last 200 and some odd years. So why did we write the Native American out of the story? So first of all, our experience in the United States was already learning from the experience

in South America, where indigenous populations, Tiano Indians, in various parts of the Caribbean islands and in South America were first resistant to the encroachment of Europeans, eventually fought against them and showed such valor in their fighting against European encroachment that there was no sense of incorporation or assimilation. So their fighting spirit created a kind of contradiction of nobility, which was what eventually gave birth to the notion of the noble savage, that these were people who were willing to die to protect their way of life. It was disease that wiped them out at the end of the day. That's what got the better of the indigenous populations. So in that regard, the pure devastation that attended to the original settlement of Europeans in the Americas eventually gave birth to a population loss that was akin to genocide by today's standards, but it was done by way of germ warfare and a really an unintended

way. Did anybody ever teach you, tell you, that Chief Justice John Jay said those who own the country should govern it? No, I mean, it reminds me of a quote that George Walker Bush used, which was that this is an ownership society, and if you don't own anything, you don't have any say. He didn't actually say the second part, but he did describe America as an ownership society. Effectively meaning that people need to be empowered through the privatization of formerly public services or the purposes of having a stake in it. And this, of course, was evidenced by his attempt to privatize social security, right? But the bottom line is that because of the significance of money in politics, because of the increasing wealth inequality in this country, people who don't own anything are often at the whim and caprice of political and business elites. Why do politicians whitewash history?

Because it helps them get elected. Why else do politicians do what they do? This is pledge time for public television, and some stations will briefly step away from us to ask for your support. For the rest of you, more years in company will resume in just a moment. We now continue with more years in company. I read just the other day that 76 percent, three quarters of college graduates are unfamiliar with the Bill of Rights, and almost that many could not say who was America's arch rival during the 40 years of the Cold War. So pretend I'm a freshman in your class at Indiana University, which you left to come to Schomburg. How do you plan to rescue me from my ignorance of the past? Well, if I get to meet you, then I'm going to encourage you to take a US history course

for starters. The problem is that our colleges and our sense of public, a sense of the public's fear are shrinking. Colleges and universities are giving increasing weight to the STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They haven't cut out the humanities. I don't want to overstate or say that there's a crisis necessarily. But there is a sense that university presidents, particularly in state university systems, have to be responsive to state legislatures. And if those state legislatures happen to be Republican, there's a lot at stake when it comes to what is the appropriate history lesson to be taught to our children. And I want to point out that in Texas, for example, a couple of years ago, there was a move by the then state regions to remove or to lessen the state's own history of civil rights,

activism, both statewide and nationally. They simply removed certain individuals. So Shay Zarshavez got less attention in the textbook and Ronald Reagan and others got more. I mean, that for practical purposes, in terms of number of words on page for certain active history. And they wanted to diminish Martin Luther King's role and increase and enhance Newt Gingrich's role. Right. So that, in my opinion, is of a piece. It's of a piece that both looks at the college as a place where history is less important to the fact of making money. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a report just two years ago in 2009, where it identified the top 10 growing fields for all Americans. Six of them were low wage entry-level service work, the preponderance of which were all in health care, basically taking care of an aging baby boomer population.

So what are we going to do about that? And if you don't study history, though, well, you are going to study history because if you don't recognize what's at stake for wealth distribution and the fact that money has been a motivating principle for shaping our society, then people don't have a sense of personal responsibility for changing the reality that they live. They simply accept that inequality is a naturalized part of the society. And they will imbibe or accept anything that a Silver Tongue politician will sell them. I mean, history is sufficient to making the point that you actually have to protect gains that have been made on behalf of something called justice and equality. The challenge is if they are historically illiterate, then they don't have access to those, that store of ideas and that evidence of experience that will help them shape whatever

they need to shape for this particular moment. So is that what you met when you said recently that black history for young people is, quote, life saving? Yes, that's exactly what I meant. But that black history begins with slavery, with irons, with lynchings, with auctions, with decades, after decades of oppression and repression. How can you say it's life saving? That's interesting because it doesn't begin with all of that. We could debate the finer points of the character of what black history is, right? Because that's what we're really talking about. What is it that most people conceive of when they hear black history? Well, there is that history of oppression. It is a unifying experience in the United States, in the American context. But many people will argue that the cultures of Africa, many cultures, many tribes, many nations, celebrated tremendous achievements by the standards of the world of the 15th, 16th, and 17th, even into the 18th century before colonization.

So depending on what it is you are trying to convey to a child, you can tell them that before the white man came, if you go to Timbuktu, you will see a thriving civilization. You will see the invention of languages that preceded the lingua funk of the world today, which of course is English. That's one way of inspiring people, and that's one way of defining black history. But alongside that very trajectory that you just described, the one of struggle, of pain, of repression, is one of survival, of triumph, of creativity. And so part of telling the story of black history is to celebrate that ability to exist in a society that is working against you, is attempting to demonize you, and still be able to triumph over it, still be able to produce original forms of art, such as jazz music. That's powerful, and that's empowering. But it's because of black people's political tradition, starting with political activism

in the context of slavery, to this day that America actually is a more democratic society, is a society that has more equality than it did 200 years ago. And that is also a powerfully inspiring history, because it were it not for black people, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the South might have taken another 50 years to have public education. And it was because of black political representatives in state congresses in the late 1860s and 1870s that they passed legislation to establish the first public education systems in the South. That's a major contribution, and it demonstrates how important making real democracy is. And this country has, including many minority groups, including women, have to thank for that tradition of black activism.

So I'm sitting there in the front row of your lecture at Indiana University, where you were teaching before you came to the Shamburg, and I've just heard you say, there's a thin line separating the past from the present, and I raised my hand, and I say, all right, Professor Muhammad, if that's the case, what does history have to tell me about stop and frisk? I asked that question because I, rather than WNYC, the public radio station here in New York recently ran a series in which they reported that one in five people stopped last year by New York City Police, were teenagers 14 to 18 years old, 86% of those teenagers stopped were either black or Latino, most of them boys. Last year, more than 120,000 stops of black and Latino, the total number of boys that that age in New York City isn't much more than that, 177,000, so which suggests that every teenage boy who's black and Latino in this city of New York is likely before he

graduates, they have been stopped and frisk by the police. So you're a historian. What does history have to tell me about stop and frisk? It tells us that it's an old and enduring form of surveillance and racial control. So if we think about the moment immediately following the Civil War, there was the invention of something called the black codes in every southern state, and those codes were intended to use the criminal justice system to restrict the freedom and mobility of black people. And if you crossed any line that they prescribed, you could be sold back to your former slave owner, not as a slave, but as a prisoner to work for your fine after an auction where you were resold to the highest bidder. It tells you something about the invention of the criminal justice system as a repressive tool to keep black people in their place from the very moment when 95% of the black population

became free. And it's still with us. It's still with us because ultimately, as a social problem, crime has become like it was in the Jim Crow South, a mechanism to control black people's movement in cities. Just as Douglas Blackman described and slavery by another name and a great book by the way, what happened to blacks after the Civil War? The invention of convict leasing as a mechanism to, I mean, it had many sources, but one was an economic project to rebuild the South on the backs of imprisoned, least African-Americans. So sold to private industry and the net simply widened because there was a lot of money to be made in doing that kind of work. And Douglas Blackman's work, we learn how elastic were laws like vagrancy laws intended effectively to empower any citizen and or law enforcement official to check the papers

of a black person moving freely along the word. And if you couldn't prove that you were currently employed bound to a tenant farming contract or a sharecropping agreement, then you were by definition a vagrant, by definition a criminal and subject to, in this case, convict leasing. So if you're a sharecropper and you're being cheated by the white landowner and you sell him to go to hell and you step away, he can call the police and say, this person just left my property and they don't have a job, they're vagrant. You get picked up, you're done. You're off to a convict lease. The point is that that elasticity, that ability to use the law as an instrument of control, the ability to use discretion is exactly what operates in the context of stop and frisk. It operated in New York, stop and frisk as a explicit policy is not that old, but as an informal practice, condemnation describes numerous instances, happening in Brooklyn

and Harlem in the 1910s and 20s and 30s. But here's the point. Today stop and frisk. If you look at the form that a police officer fills out, the boxes create tremendous opportunity for discretion, so furtive movements, suspicious behavior, but probably the one that's most indicative of this is one box that says, where's clothes, wearing clothing known to be associated with criminals. What does that mean for an 18-year-old black or Latino boy in New York City? He has sagging pants. Is that sufficient grounds for investigating whether or not he's a criminal or not, a carrying contraband? Does he have a white t-shirt? Is he wearing a backpack that could contain drugs? In other words, it's incredibly elastic and in other words, it allows law enforcement in this city, just like it did in the 1870s in Alabama, to have the widest birth of discretion

to challenge a person, a black male on the streets, to ask them, where are you going and do you belong here? And as it turns out, if you don't have ID, you can be subject to arrest in the city. There's a hallways monitoring program that the NYPD uses to go into private buildings for the purposes of making sure that there's no drug dealing happening in those buildings. And as the Village Voice reported just a few months ago, a young man walked out in his pajamas to empty his trash. He happened to come across an NYPD officer. The officer asked him for his ID to prove that he lived in the building and wasn't a drug dealer. He didn't have one. He was fine. That's discretion. That's abuse of authority. That is the racial context because, and here's where race really matters today, and I want everybody to be clear about this. Why race matters today and defies the logic of Bloomberg that this is really about saving black people, and this is a color blind public safety agenda, is because no white community

in America would tolerate this kind of treatment in the name of public safety in its communities. Period. You couldn't go into any east side apartment or any west side co-op anywhere in New York City and start asking 17-year-old white boys for ID when they were out in their pajamas. Why? Because their political power in the city and in other parts of this country is sufficient to get a politician to question whether or not that's the America that we want to live in. But when it comes to black and brown people, today, as was true 100 years ago, they are subject to certain criminal justice policies. Those policies in Alabama lasted way into the civil rights era and stopped questioning the risk. Informal practices have been going on for over 100 years. You have written a biography of an idea here, and the idea you're writing about is how blacks came to be singled out nationally as an exceptionally dangerous people.

Sure. Think about it this way, Bill. There's no moment in time. No moment in time exists where race is not a primary factor in the treatment of black people. And so the crime issue, if we just equate crime or criminalization and racial stigma, there is no moment where race is not an organizing principle for how black people's behavior is defined in American society. That's the problem. And so policies like Stop Question and Frisk evolved not because they were invented in that moment, but because they continued in that moment. And immigrant communities got police reform, and black people got police repression. It's not to understand, but in the North 100 years ago in your home city of Chicago, blacks were only about 2 percent of the population, maybe 4 percent of the population. And yet Stop and Frisk became very popular there. That's right.

And unfortunately, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, there was a meeting of the minds between progressives and white supremacists. And the meeting of the minds wasn't as we might think it was, because this was also the same moment where people like Jane Adams and William Walling and Joseph Lee, the progressive leader started the NAACP. They were deeply concerned about political disenfranchisement in civil rights, but crime was the great exception. And in this one space, southerners were far more influential in terms of telling northerners that black people were not ready for citizenship, that they were not responsible for following the rules of society. And northerners took note and essentially developed policies and practices, primarily policing of urban space. These like Stop, Question, and Frisk helped to create the ghettos of Harlem, of Chicago, of West Philadelphia, that were in their infancy at the turn of the 20th century.

And it was only on the basis of criminality that progressives and other liberals said to those black communities that we're going to let you work out your own salvation, we're going to let you stay in these isolated communities until you exhibit the bourgeois behaviors of respectability and law abidingness. And all of this may sound appropriate to viewers listening today, except that the same didn't hold true for European immigrants, who gave so much trouble to civic reformers. They didn't speak the language, they brought old world cultural traits, they were loud, they wanted to pedal, they're wares all over the street, there were too many of them, they lived in really dense places, they were brewing wine and other liquors in their bathtub, some were extortionists going around collecting taxes and duties from small businesses. Well, they didn't say we're going to let you work out your own salvation.

They said we've got to get in here and Americanize these people. That's what the progressive movement was. That's what the progressive movement was. That's what the progressive movement was about. That's what the progressive movement was about. The job opportunities, social mobility, but not, you say, for blacks, they were pinned off. They were pinned off. And they were pinned off in a way that crime became the legitimate reason and rationale for that segregation. In other words, crime among immigrants and even native born working class whites was understood to be a consequence, not of their moral character or of their cultural framework, but in fact of economics and class. So even Europe's peasants, even Europe's marginalized and dispossessed who came here in search of opportunity, benefited from a civilizationist discourse, from a way of ranking the world's people that said any European, no matter how dastardly or despicable, has the stuff of Europe, has the stuff of civilization with just a little bit of help

will be on their way to greener pastures. But black people were still understood even in places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia as being fundamentally flawed in their nature. But you go on to say in the book that blackness was refashioned through statistics. That statistics about black crime were ubiquitous, but statistics about white crime were invisible. Was that deliberate? It was over time. So it wasn't that way from the very beginning. The problem is that black people were enslaved. There was no point in tracking them statistically because they weren't a population problem. They were enslaved. Well, once they were free, the demographers now turned immediately to statistics and said, we've got to figure out how many black babies are born each year, how many black babies die, what are the diseases that they die from, and eventually they turn to crime statistics. Their initial point in using statistics was not to celebrate the presence of black people,

but to determine how much of a presence physically black people would have in the nation. And as it turns out, because enslaved people don't go to prison, they're dealt with summarily as plantation justice. Now as free people, they're going to prison. And in 1890, for the first time, a statistician looked up and said, wow, there's a disproportionate prison population of black people. They're 30% of the nation's prisoners, and they're only 12% of the nation's population. Well, as it turns out, if we just let them be, they will commit enough crimes and go to prison, and we won't have to worry about the economic resources that have to be distributed amongst the Italians, amongst the Irish, amongst the Polish Catholics, and now amongst the black people. And so, the very notion of refashioning their identity as a criminal identity was intended to be a mechanism to limit social resources on behalf of black communities, to effectively say, because they are criminals, they don't deserve even education.

You're not denying that there were crimes. I'm not denying that there were crimes. Black violence on violence. I mean, the book doesn't deny that. I want to make that clear to the audience. But that somehow the black criminal became a representative of his race, to think and talk about African-Americans as criminal, you write, is encoded deeply in our DNA. Correct. But the question became, are we going to help black people like we help the immigrants? And the answer was? The answer was, because they are criminals, no. And that was a rationale rooted in racial logic. It was a rationale tied to sets of ideas that privileged Europeans as people who could benefit from the help of native white reformers, elites like Jane Adams, and black people could not.

It effectively created the circumstances that gave birth to modern segregation in our biggest cities. So as those populations grew, the basic infrastructure remained the same. It was, it's amazing to me, astonishing to go through here and find so much of the evidence you've collected. You have even President Roosevelt telling black college graduates in 1904 that quote, criminality is in the ultimate analysis a greater danger to your race than any other thing can be. And one sociologist after another saying, you blacks are your own worst enemies, the cost of your criminal nature. And that took hold in the ideology of down to America, did it not? That's the same dominant ideology that we have today. I mean, it's not packaged in the same explicit rhetoric, but it has given birth to policies like stop question and frisk that Mayor Bloomberg has consistently defends, Ray Kelly consistently defends, policies such as mass incarceration. We are still living with the same basic ideas and arguments about the relationship between

black criminality and social responsibility between segregation and public safety today as we were in the 1890s in this country. Here's the testimony of one of the most influential scholars of the time, Nathaniel Southgate Schailer, a Harvard scientist and prolific writer on race relations. Here's what he wrote in 1884 quote, there can be no sort of doubt that judged by the light of all experience, these people blacks are a danger to America greater and more insuperable than any of those that menace the other great civilized states of the world. He wrote that in the Atlantic magazine. Here's Hittin, Rowan Helper arguing that America would self-destruct if it gave blacks the right to vote. He said Negroes with their crime stained blackness could not rise to a plain higher than that of base and beastlike savagery. Seeing then that the Negro does indeed belong to a lower and inferior order of beings, why

in the name of heaven? Why should we forever degrade and disgrace both ourselves and our posterity by entering of our own volition into more intimate relations with him? May God in his restraining mercy forbid that we should ever do this most foul and wicked thing. Now this is not talk radio back in 1884 or 1904, these are prominent scholars, Harvard, Atlantic magazine, writing this and you're saying that in some interior, structural way, these sentiments still affect how we deal with each other today. Absolutely. We've got the biggest prison system the world has ever known. The prison system, by the way, that came of age in this moment right after the end of the civil rights movement.

So at precisely the moment that black people have their second shot at equality in America legally, legislatively, right? I mean, you know as well as anyone that we didn't need this 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Boating Act, if the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment had really been sufficient to creating equality. So right after that moment, even under Lyndon Mange Johnson, there is an expansion of federal support for local law enforcement on the basis that black people's crime is a danger to civil society. All of this may make sense to a viewer and to a listener if they didn't know that those same threats to civil society posed by European immigrants weren't treated in a fundamentally different way. That's the point. Crime in and of itself was not sufficient to justify a punitive law and order political response or a set of ideas that exist today as they did then that saw black people's

crime as evidence of some moral inferiority, some natural propensity to want to hurt people or to steal things. For the European immigrant, in the hands of a eugenicist, that was all true. These people can't help themselves, they're a threat to society. But the progressive said no. And what's more telling about the progressives is they actually got rid of statistics. They stopped using the language of statistics, 15% of all crimes in this city are committed by the Irish and other 45% by the Italians. They stopped talking that way and saying that these are the children of immigrants who are becoming Americans and we must help them. We must put them on the path to success and that's how they started talking to them. So much so and this is an important point. By the 1930s, the federal government started collecting arrest data across the nation and this information is produced quarterly and annually.

It's called the uniform crime reports. So soon you will see in the New York Times the latest data which tells us whether crime is rising or falling overall in our nation's cities. That was invented in 1930, but here's the point. This is a really important one. Prior to that uniform crime report which nationalized and standardized arrest statistics, local arrest data was collected in Philadelphia and New York et cetera. And if you pull out an annual report, the page would look like this, tracking offenses by category because it would say Italian, Irish, Germans, Scandinavian, Mexican, so on and so forth, all the way across. It looked like an Excel spreadsheet today. By the 1930s with the federal government systemizing national arrest data and really becoming the most authoritative basis for understanding crime at the local level and national level, guess what it was? White, black, foreign-born, other.

That was for the first three years. By 1933 it was white, black, other. So effectively what it did was erase. It simply erased the category of the white ethnic criminal. Black became the single defining measure of deviance from a white norm. So as long as black in that accounting showed disproportionate levels of any activity across those categories, white was always normalized and in effect it made invisible white criminality. We don't talk about white criminality, we don't talk about the white prison population, nobody, no average person in the street can tell you how many white men are in prison or white men between the ages of 18 and 35 who are likely to spend time in prison. Actually the truth is the number is greater now today than it was 30 years ago because the size of the prison system has also increased the number of white men. So this is how black criminality emerges along with disease and intelligence, the size

of the brain. Correct. That's the measure of black inferiority, with consequences down to the moment. That's right. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us. It's been great. That's it for this week. See you next time.