Western criminology was founded on racialized theories of born criminality.

Evidence

Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that non-White men loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” His Criminal Man gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876. Criminals were born, not bred, Lombroso said. He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” Black women, in their close “degree of differentiation from the male,” he claimed in The Female Offender in 1895, were the prototypical female criminals. As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 686

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook example of Kendi’s causal inversion — criminological science produced to justify racialized violence already underway; connects to the reader’s core goal of placing arguments into segregationist/antiracist schemes.
• SEED: The founding myth of criminology as objective science built on Lombroso’s race theory is a strong angle for an essay on how ‘objective’ disciplines encode racist presumption.