His research examines the evolution of mainstream discourse around black criminality, and past and present connections between racial thinking and racial discrimination among crime-prevention agencies and within the criminal justice system. Muhammad is the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, recently published by Harvard University Press and a former associate editor of the Journal of American History. He and his scholarship have been featured in the Washington Post, on National Public Radio and PBS. He is a great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, and the son of Ozier Muhammad, a photographer for the New York Times.