The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Paperback – January 16, 2012

Slavery supposedly ended in 1865, at the end of The Civil War. So, we are told. Then, here comes Professor Michelle Alexander to tell us that simply is not true. Slavery's child was something called Jim Crow, a whole system of laws designed to thwart the lives of African-American people on so many different levels. In order to fight Jim Crow, The Civil Rights Movement waged war on many fronts, many of them legal. The thinking went that if the legal barriers were dropped, the lives of African-Americans would be so much better. Or, so it was thought. Then came Ronald Reagan into the office of the Presidency. A War was waged, the so-called, "War On Drugs." This has led to the fact that all over America, people of color, but particularly Black Men and the poor, are herded into prisons, with all kinds of drug charges and laws. These charges result in a whole system that selectively targets where it will be "enforcing" the drug laws. If a certain community has a predominance of drug activity, but yet law enforcement never bothers to scrutinize that community, then drug dealers from that community will never be charged. Studies have shown that there is no more drug activity in Black Communities than in others, but the Prison/Industrial Complex is set up in such a way that only certain communities are scrutinized, or disproportionally, scrutinized for them. Of course if the police never look for drugs in a certain place, they will never find them. When those who have been caught up in the system become released from prison, now it becomes "legal" to discriminate against them. Their "records" can be used to discriminate against them in employment, housing, education, in a word--everything. Welcome to "The New Jim Crow." Right here in America. Home of the free. A Democracy. Who wants to laugh? (to keep from crying?). In thumbnail sketch, this is what Michelle Alexander lays out in her book, the unfairness of it all, how it makes a mockery of the concept of justice and Democracy. It is Professor Alexander's opinion that the phenomenon that she spells out, The Prison/Industrial Complex, should become the basis for the next Civil Rights Movement. In this respect, I think that she is right. Although Professor Alexander is an attorney, what is most fascinating about her book is how she tells her personal story as basically being an oblivious, average citizen, who thought that when people said the war on drugs was a war on Black people, they were exaggerating. But, as she began to look into things, she saw the truth of this thesis and ultimately felt she had to do something about it. This, in part, led to her book. This book is written in a very readable style so that it is available to the average reader. I think Professor Alexander's book is excellent in educating and bringing to the spotlight what needs to be our next Civil Rights Movement. Words cannot really express my gratefulness to her for doing this. In talking about the Prison/Industrial Complex, there is another book that can be found right here on Amazon that complements Alexander's. It's called "The Anatomy Of Prison Life" by Charles L. Hinsley. It is the most honest and real account that one will ever find on what it means to be in prison, written from the eyes of a Black Man first/Former Warden perspective. It is well worth your time. One should mull over in one's mind, as one reads, the connection between the Alexander and Hinsley books. For those interested in the more general subject of Black Studies, there's a book called, "Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture," by Thomas D. Rush that gives some good background to the 2 books mentioned above. Rush's book can also be found right here on Amazon. In Rush's work, we get to see the "average Joe's" fascinating 1989 account of two very long conversations with what will eventually become the first African-American President in American History. It's good to get this account because it occurs long before President Obama is famous, between two people just going about the daily business of their lives. What makes the interaction even more compelling is the fact that Obama innocently lays out an image of what he hopes to see occur within his romantic life, a romantic life prior to the time of his introduction to Michelle. It is oh so fascinating, and can be found in the piece on page 95 of Rush's work called, "You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet." Rush's book also contains additional Black Cultural anecdotes of richness, making it an overall, well-rounded book and worthy of your purchase.

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is a jarring, intricate look into one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time: mass incarceration. A former American Civil Liberties Union attorney and current professor of law at Ohio State University, Alexander takes on the role of scholar-insurgent in The New Jim Crow and argues for nothing less than a full interrogation of what she sees as the most "damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement" (11). This "backlash," according to Alexander--generally understood in civil rights history common sense as the rise of a New Right--is much more insidious, racist, and systematic than previously thought. Mass incarceration, she argues, is a "tightly networked system of laws, policies, [and] institutions" that looks eerily similar to life under Jim Crow and even slavery (13). Those caught in the crosshairs of this system of (racial) social control suffer life-long, legal discrimination in housing, welfare, suffrage, employment, and health care--all of which lead to a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (181).Such marginality has several causes, yet she sees colorblind racial indifference and the War on Drugs as the two biggest culprits in the creation of yet another permanent racial under-caste. To make her case, Alexander pounds readers with facts, statistics, and Supreme Court rulings--the fact that "as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records" as one of many gut-checks (7). In short, Alexander's The New Jim Crow lays bare the troubling, racist realities of the American criminal justice system. And yet, maybe due to the severity of her topic, Alexander makes occasional leaps in logic, oversimplifies at times, and even lets the pathos of the subject matter cloud her conclusions. Nevertheless, her arguments are mostly sound and ultimately make the case for a desperately needed shift in public discourse and civil rights advocacy to address the "human rights nightmare" that is mass incarceration (15).One of the most convincing parts of The New Jim Crow is the chapter entitled "The Lockdown." With powerful detail, Alexander takes readers step-by-step along the criminal justice chain to expose how the racist War on Drugs is waged. What she calls the "Rules of the Game," Alexander convincingly argues that the War on Drugs depends upon the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights--rights that protect privacy of person and property. Alexander threads the Supreme Court decisions of California v. Acevedo, Terry v. Ohio, and Florida v. Bostick to show that police tactics such as stop-and-frisk are protected by Supreme Court rulings. This point is not to be taken lightly, for it leads readers to understand that the state is absolutely complicit in both freeing police to round up whomever they want as well as tie the hands of citizens seeking legal recourse against discriminatory policing. This dynamic of racist state-based control, Alexander reveals, gets worse and worse as those arrested are hamstrung by unchecked prosecutorial powers, grossly inadequate public representation, mandatory minimum sentences, and perpetual "correctional supervision" if labeled felons (92). Readers are left wondering how such injustice can go on in a supposedly democratic society. Alexander is at her best here, implicating the entire institution of American justice in fewer than 50 pages.Alexander's arguments in parts of other chapters, however, lack precision and evidence. In Chapter 4, Alexander writes: "If we actually learned to show love...and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement--rather than go colorblind--mass incarceration would not exist today" (172). Although a belief in cross-racial "love" and solidarity seems like it would remedy racial inequalities and, in a clear reach, mass incarceration, Alexander's argument is regrettably naïve here. For one, as she demonstrates pages earlier in the same chapter, civil rights leaders and everyday folk acknowledging race or "blackness" is not something that can be easily remedied with simple effort or even love. Rather, unconscious and conscious racism is difficult to out and defeat--with the 1995 study in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education in Chapter 3 as one of her many examples (107). While it is helpful to recognize that racism works at the unconscious level, it's unfair to argue that such "pre-thought" racism will go away with simple love and concern. Mass incarceration, without question, is part and parcel of a larger history of black criminalization and the racist political economy that is the US criminal justice system. In the above quote, it seems like Alexander is lost in the pathos of her subject and ignores her very own arguments from pages earlier.What is also problematic is Alexander's assumption that love "across racial lines" was absent during the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the fact that she provides no evidence, one can simply study the history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina or Milwaukee and discover that cross-racial concern was absolutely occurring during the civil rights movement. Now how we define "love" and "concern" may be up for debate, but to categorically frame the civil rights movement--and all conscious sympathizers--as lacking in concern and love just doesn't hold water. It would have been much more productive for Alexander to take the civil rights movement as well as racial justice champions to task with convincing evidence. She does this to some degree in her later chapters, but her "no concern" claim unfairly lays mass incarceration at the feet of civil rights thinkers.If Alexander's purpose is to "stimulate a conversation" and get people thinking and talking about mass incarceration, she has accomplished her goal (15). Over the past two years, in fact, Alexander has appeared on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, and C-SPAN, as well as been invited to give talks in churches, universities, bookstores, and other spaces around the country. In light of her critical embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the apparent rise of her The New Jim Crow as perhaps a galvanizing force for justice, the popularity of her book begs a few questions: Is The New Jim Crow and similar works that centralize injustice the new frontier for a contemporary Civil Rights Movement? And is The New Jim Crow evidence enough that the Civil Rights Movement has never ended, but only recast in the realm of ideas? Alexander, of course, would argue that a movement must be more than ideas; it must also be built on love, human and racial recognition, and the full embrace of difference. For Alexander, nothing less will do. However, as she argues in her "Introduction," racialized systems of control are "inevitable"--almost as if mass incarceration is destined to be reborn (15). Though Alexander gives ways to prevent this rebirth, such teleology, though present throughout her book, is never reconciled. In the end, we are left with a conflicted, uneasy sense of hope as the racial control telos haunts readers even after the book has been shelved.

Bien

Livre vraiment instructif. Si le sujet vous intéresse, vous ne serez pas déçu !

Ich habe dieses Buch für eine Studienarbeit bestellt. Es erklärt die unter dem Deckmantel "colorblindness" herrschende Rassendiskriminierung in den USA.Absolut lesenswert!

A comprehensive outline of how racism and discrimination has been perpetuated through the American Legal system - this book gives you into how the USA is where it is today. It's particularly salient in the wake of George Floyd and other victims of this system

Probably the best book in modern times about civil rights issues and crony capitalism