Khalil Gibran Muhammad to Present on Race, Inequality, and American Democracy

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a leading scholar on racial justice in America, will share his perspective on “Race, Inequality, and American Democracy."
Muhammad is a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. His research focuses on the racial politics of the criminal justice system, from laws to policing and punishment. His award-winning book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” chronicles the formation of black criminality in contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants.

“Professor Muhammad is one of the foremost young scholars of the 20th century African-American and U.S. experience today,” said Joe Trotter, CMU’s Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice.

Muhammad is a contributor to The Nation magazine on topics such as the way the alt-right uses social science to increase acceptance of racism. He has written about the 2018 documentary, "Stranger Fruit," about Michael Brown, who was killed by a white police officer in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. His work on playing “the race card” has appeared in The New York Times.

In 2017, Muhammad received the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history.