Khalil was part of a protest led by the Black Student Union where he and other students tried to confiscate the entire run of the school newspaper. Most importantly, they share one key feature - the use of brutal force to control black Americans.ĪRABLOUEI: But before we dive into that history, it's important to note why Khalil decided to dedicate his career to studying the history of the criminal justice system in America.ĪRABLOUEI: It started when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. These stories are very different but share some striking similarities. And he does that by telling parallel narratives about the history of policing in the north and the South. MUHAMMAD: The Condemnation Of Blackness: Race, Crime, And The Making Of Modern Urban America.ĪBDELFATAH: In his book, Khalil lays out a historical argument for how black people have been criminalized over the last 400 years in the U.S. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School.ĪBDELFATAH: And he's the author of the book. KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: My name's Khalil Gibran Muhammad. His voice helped us tell the story of mass incarceration, so you might recognize it. And so we reached out to a historian who we were introduced to by our colleague Gene Demby from NPR's podcast Code Switch.

It's an incredibly disturbing repetition, one that's been occurring for a very, very long time. Our research led us to making an episode on the history of mass incarceration, and we never got back to policing.ĪBDELFATAH: Yet here we are asking the same questions after another high-profile case of a black person killed by the police.

We wanted to know how policing in America started and how the relationship between police and the black community had evolved to be one so bloody and tragic. This was a year after Freddie Gray died in the custody of Baltimore police. Before we start the show, we want to give you a heads up that there are descriptions of graphic violence and other heavy content in this episode.Ī few years ago when we were developing what would become THROUGHLINE, one of the first topics we wanted to learn more about was the history of policing.

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