The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Recommended by: Bruce MacKenzie
Purchase →Alexander recounts the rebirth of a caste-like system resulting in millions of African Americans locked behind bars, relegated to second-class status, and denied the rights won in the legislation adopted following civil rights movement of the 60’s. In targeting black men through the War on Drugs, Alexander contends the U.S. criminal justice system is functioning as a contemporary racial control mechanism even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.
The thesis of The New Jim Crow is that through the use of the War on Drugs and the 1994 Crime bill the United States engaged in a system of mass incarceration, Relying on felony drug charges, the criminal justice system implemented a form of racial control that relegated people of color to a permanent state of economic, political, and social marginalization similar to the southern Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Although the 14th and 15th amendments granted people of color full citizenship, Alexander describes how people people caught within the criminal justice system while in jail and when released, are not entitled to participate in many of the rights of citizenship such as voting, receiving public housing and economic assistance such as food stamps. They become “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” or what Alexander calls an “undercaste.” As she summarizes, the “formerly incarcerated are “relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence”
The author’s extensive research decimates many claims, assumptions, and stereotypes that are commonly advanced as justification for the criminal justice systems emphasis on combatting illegal drugs and the need for harsher penalties to enforce the laws relating to drug use. Alexander emphasizes the fact that the US, despite its claim of being the most enlightened civilization, has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the the War on Drugs has failed and that the penal system effects control over a disproportionate percentage of people of color. It is difficult to finish reading this book unconvinced as to the validity of most, if not all, of her claims.
Alexander’s main point is that the New Jim Crow and our rhetoric of “colorblindness” disguises the reality of a new racial caste system. Alexander draws on Martin Luther King in challenging the concept that America has moved to a post racial colorblind society. As she points out in her final chapter, Martin Luther King believed it was a flawed public consensus that was at the root of racial oppression. King recognized that it was indifference to the plight of other races that supported institutions and cultures of racial injustice. As King wrote in Strength to love “One of the great tragedies of man’s long trek along the highway of history has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation. The consequence of this insular approach is that one really does not mind what happens to people outside your group.” Racial indifference rather than racial hostility forms the foundation of a racial caste system.
The New Jim Crow” effectively demonstrates with facts and legal precedent that over the last 20 years our society has implemented drug laws, legal interpretations, and law enforcement practices, when viewed objectively, demonstrate that we are engaging in the flawed public consensus that concerned King. Alexander’s book requires us to recognize that our culture and its legal system adversely impacts people of color. When that occurs we cannot be colorblind. If we are, then we are complicit in the oppression.