Khalil Gibran Muhammad

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the director of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy. His academic work focuses on racial criminalization and the origins of the carceral state. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American studies and was released in a second edition in 2019.

During his fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute, Muhammad is completing a draft of a book on the narrow promises of a post–Civil Rights era, focused on liberal elites’ insistence on market-centered solutions to long-standing policies of economic inequality and structural racism.

Muhammad is an award-winning teacher and a frequent reviewer and commentator in national print and broadcast media outlets, such as National Public Radio, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. He has appeared in several feature-length documentaries, including Slavery by Another Name (2012), the Oscar-nominated 13th (2016), and Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (2019). He holds two honorary doctorates and received a 2017 Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service from Columbia University. Muhammad earned his PhD from Rutgers University.

Racial Wealth Gap May Be a Key to Other Inequities (Harvard Gazette, 6/3/21)

In The Wake Of Chauvin's Conviction, A Look Back At The Origins Of American Policing (NPR, 4/22/21)

In Nubian Square, Black Bostonians Exhale after Chauvin Verdict, But Fear Unjust Police Killings Will Happen Again (GBH News, 4/21/21)

Record Turnout of Black Voters Comes after Decades of Activism (Harvard Gazette, 2/17/21)

Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Why Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Fail (Harvard Gazette, 10/1/20)

It Really Is Different This Time (Politico, 6/4/20)

American Police (NPR, 6/3/20)