Khalil Gibran Muhammad calls himself a “born-again academic.” He became a public accountant with a large consulting firm when he graduated with his bachelor’s degree. But in those formative college years, his eyes also opened to realities around him. The 1991 Rodney King beating put police brutality front and center for him and many of his generation.

“By the time I was leaving college, I was already mentally pivoting towards, ‘Maybe I would like to go to school and learn more about why this country is the way it is, and why we see the things that we see around issues of race and racism,’” he said and, a few years later, he did just that.

Muhammad earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Rutgers University and started his academic career at Indiana University. He joined the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015. Earlier this year, the Essex County resident cut his commute by hundreds of miles by joining Princeton, where he is the University’s inaugural professor of African American studies and public affairs, with joint appointments in African American Studies and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

His “born again” lens makes him a historian who is deeply interested in applying what he studies — the broad intersections of systemic racism, structural inequality, and democracy in the U.S. — to the real world. He’s a regular guest on Boston Public Radio and has been widely featured in the popular press. Muhammad is also the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library and the leading archive of global Black history.

While there, Muhammad reflected on how even people who frequented the center lacked a nuanced and complex understanding of U.S. history.

“I thought to myself, if a basically sympathetic audience has a steep learning curve, then what does that mean for an unsympathetic audience, and what does it mean for policymakers who have never stepped foot in a place where race is the central category of analysis, and where they have their own strong opinions about how we should be talking about race, but know even less than the audiences that show up at the Schomburg?” he said.

In an interview from his new office in Morrison Hall, Muhammad shared how that realization shaped his journey, and how he will continue his life’s work at Princeton:

The most pressing challenge in my research area today is … trying to make light of the range of ideas that thought leaders and other influencers in this country have had about how to measure racial progress and how to define it.

As a historian, I'm well aware of how a first generation of African American leaders moved into the private sector and into unprecedented positions in federal government in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and certainly in critical mass by the 1980s. I try to understand what they expected in terms of their own individual success, set against attempts to address massive structural inequalities that did not end simply by virtue of passing civil rights legislation. I also try to recreate the relationship that many of them as individuals had with their white elite counterparts — who were folks who vouched for them, who hired them, who advised and mentored them. It's not entirely easy to recreate that kind of dialog, but I use archives and oral history.

The range of statistics on racial disparities, from education to economics to housing to health care to policing and environmental exposure, are clear signs that African American health and wellbeing in this country were not to be fixed simply by virtue of Black people breaking through at the highest levels of this country's leadership class, including the presidency — the notion that “assimilation politics” for Black people could yield powerful symbolic representation.

[President Barack] Obama is one measure of progress. Yet there are the underlying realities of [racial disparities in] premature death, which the COVID pandemic really laid bare, alongside the killing of any number of unarmed Black people over roughly a decade, of which George Floyd was kind of the culminating moment for protests. That would elicit the election of a president whose journey to winning the presidency ran through a lie about the Black president not actually being qualified, to stoke white supremacists’ reactions. That is hard to make sense of logically, because Obama's presidency never lived up to the claims of it being the most socialistic liberal threat that America has ever faced, as a matter of fact.

So, there's two realities there that I'm interested in: one, what did assimilation politics yield over a 60-year period as a matter of measuring progress, and how you measure that. Two, that the underlying material reality [for Black people] did not change as much as people might think, and yet, [President Donald] Trump and the MAGA movement are desperately fighting back against something that is not real, at least it seems to me.

Princeton SPIA is interesting to me because… the School offers the opportunity to reach public servants much earlier because of its undergraduate population. I'm already teaching some of them in my undergraduate class, which is cross-listed between SPIA and African American studies. That's entirely new and exciting.

I hope to offer them a keener sense of how powerful historical narrative shapes how people think about the normative values they pursue in leadership roles. Everyone operates with, “What happened before that? I think it can be better, and this is how I want to fix it.” The problem is that some of those histories are partial, or flawed, or wrong. There are some fundamentals, particularly if you're going to do domestic policy work in this country, that are so foundational to how the United States came to be the most powerful country in the world.

Whether you come from somewhere else or you were born here, it just seems to me that if we want our leaders to be as prepared as possible, to make sense of the world we live in and to go about improving it, then we can't ignore the kind of history that I teach.

In the case of SPIA, I'm also excited about the prospect of working with colleagues who I long admired. They work in sociology, anthropology, politics, and history and have formal affiliations with SPIA. Being able to work in a collaborative way is very exciting, in terms of advancing my own research projects, learning from them, and potentially contributing to their work.

At Princeton SPIA, I hope to… build a research practice through the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project that helps to advance some of the local goals of this state. I co-chaired a reparations study that was published just this past June 19. With SPIA in NJ and some of the other collaborations the University has — including its work with incarcerated people and environmental research projects that seek to advance equity goals  — there are opportunities in line both with the University's mission and with the state of New Jersey, of which the reparations work is one part.

I've never worked in New Jersey. I'm very active in local civic work, but I've always had to do it while working elsewhere, whether I was working in Harlem or at Harvard. I've never had the opportunity to be more firmly grounded in university-based collaborations that are interested in helping the state solve some of its own problems. And so that, to me, is a very rich and exciting opportunity, and it’s unique to being here in this space.

If I weren’t in academia… I'd probably be a civil rights attorney or advocate of one kind or another. I do have this role as board chair of one of the largest criminal justice reform organizations in the country, the Vera Institute of Justice. I have responsibilities that are centered in practice, in this case, in criminal justice and immigration reform. If I weren't an academic, I'd probably be in that space in some other capacity.

The person most influential in my life has been… my mother. She played a huge role in teaching me how to be a kind and thoughtful person, to be appreciative of the things that I had that other people didn't or couldn't take for granted. She gave me a keen awareness of inequality and being concerned about the least of these or the less fortunate. She also was a really good sparring partner growing up, meaning things that I thought as a teenager, didn't always align with what she thought. She was my first interlocutor, the first person who I encountered with viewpoint diversity, and I've benefited from our being close enough to talk and disagree and learn together.

On a Saturday night, you’ll most likely find me… eating out with my wife and/or a group of friends. I don't mind just being home, but I spend a lot of time traveling too, so I get the best of both worlds.

My secret talent is… I absolutely love playing the piano. I wouldn't call it a talent, but it’s a passion. When I started my career at Indiana University, I used to keep a keyboard in my office, just to give me a mental break if I needed it. This office isn't big enough for my keyboard. And you know, I played at Harvard and IU a couple times. I just happened to be among colleagues, and there was a piano in the room. I wish I were more talented, but I'm going to stick to it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.