The dissemination and collection of Black crime statistics was, from its inception, a sly eugenics project. Black criminality theory, according to Muhammad, was a “standard repackaging of proslavery beliefs” and became the basis for new forms of racialized surveillance and discriminatory legal practices, including over-policing and unequal sentencing. Arrest and incarceration records were then converted into data that institutionalized Black inferiority, in an “unbiased” fashion that shielded its architects from the charge of racism.
This deliberate condemnation was, more than anything else, a reflection not of the numbers but of the core beliefs of those who crafted it and was a way of understanding Blackness that ultimately justified racist practices by asserting that Black people were naughty by nature.
The 1890 census showed, for example, that out of the nation’s 82,329 total prisoners, 24,277 were “negro criminals.” While the numbers may have been accurate, their interpretation was profoundly biased, failing to take into account a criminal justice system that disproportionately assumed Black guilt, often arresting Black victims for white crimes or punishing Black citizens who were the victims of attacks by white mobs. Still, the statistics were enough to convince social scientists that Black people were innately criminal.
In a distorted social system, numbers do not speak for themselves. Muhammad looks beyond the data to fallacies in its analysis. As Irish, Italians, Slavs, and other ethnic groups were folded into whiteness, Black crime was compared only to “white” crime. For example, while a 1903 study showed that there were more petty crimes committed by the Irish in the beginning of the century than those committed by Black people, Irish crime was ultimately subsumed into the single normative category of whiteness, while Black crime remained a stand-alone category.
Black inferiority was thus “proven” by statistics rooted in a criminal justice system stacked against Black people, and when it was embraced by respectable academics, it became conventional wisdom, thus creating a kind of social Darwinist circle jerk. For example, high mortality rates among Blacks were also considered biological proof of enfeeblement. Ignored were the causes of these statistics: racism, police brutality, white mob violence, poverty, and a lack of access to health care.
This data-based mythology even spawned a Black disappearance hypothesis, which theorized that Black people, given their fragile health and deviant ways, might, like a virus, just disappear one day. Or, as W. E. B. Du Bois said, “If the Negro will kindly go to the devil and make haste about it, then the American conscience can justify three centuries of shameful history.”