02/25
The reading The Condemnation of Blackness by author Khalil Gibran Muhammad expresses important themes regarding racialized crime statistics, and how these statistics have been used as an excuse to overpolice and imprison Black Americans. He explains that the US has a long history of using crime data to prove Black inferiority, collecting bias statistics that have been used to support an inaccurate assumption of inherent Black criminality. A key term to define from this reading could be Social Darwinism , a racist ideology steming from Darwin’s Origin of Species. Social Darwinists espout that there is a biological difference between the races, trying to provide scientific proof for white supremacy so they can have an excuse for blatant racism and systematic discrimination. Phony theories like this were backed by statistics that counted disproportionately high rates of crime and imprisonment for Black citizens, all collected without any acknowledgement of the racist policing and ju...