Pushkin

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman.

There's no more pressing question facing the United States today, or really at any time,

than the relationship between race, crime, and incarceration.

Today, one in every three young African-American men is locked up. That's a moral

crisis, and it's one that has troubled leaders in the United States, white and black, for most of the

last century and a half. To talk about this crucial question, I'm joined by Khalil Jubran

Muhammad. He's professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard,

and he's the author of a deeply insightful and prize-winning book called Condemming Blackness.

He's one of the leading thinkers in the United States on the deep causes and potential solutions

to what he sometimes calls the carceral state, the state that puts people in

prison. Kalil, thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad to be here. So Kalil, you're a historian.

Your major book, really a field-changing book that came out almost a decade ago, not quite, called the

condom. Oh gosh, that sounds bad. No, that's a good thing. I mean, when you transform a field, not quite. Oh, gosh, it sounds bad.

No, that's a good thing.

I mean, when you transform a field, you know, it takes time for it to spread to everybody.

The book's called The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. You showed in the book that this phenomenon of white people and the white power structure thinking of African Americans as

criminals to be imprisoned goes back way beyond that period, that there is no idyllic picture

of 1950s and 60s. The idyllic picture never existed in fact at all with respect to these questions.

You take us back to the period immediately after reconstruction or the failed reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War.

Tell us a little bit about your core story there, about what fundamentally didn't happen after the end of slavery?

Yeah, so the easiest way to think about the origin story is that for most of the last 50 years,

...