Michelle Alexander does not assume full credit for the striking title of her book The New Jim Crow, recounting having seen the slogan on a “bright orange poster” in 1998.[footnoteRef:1] Former ACLU attorney turned law professor, Michelle Alexander had always been aware of the need for justice system reform. Alexander worked headed the ACLU Racial Justice Project but it took that bright orange poster to help her draw the connection between drug policy and race-related social justice issues in America. Her initial research revealed that up to three quarters of the prison terms being served for drug offences are Black or Latino, even though the “majority of the country’s illegal drug users and dealers are white.”[footnoteRef:2] Alexander herself is bi-racial, with a white mother and a black father. She experienced discrimination from an early age, forcing her parents out of their community. Her childhood experiences spurned racial awareness, and prompted Alexander to pursue a career as a civil rights attorney. [1: Arnie Cooper, “Throwing Away the Key,” The Sun, February 2011, https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key ] [2: Arnie Cooper, “Throwing Away the Key,” https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key]
After investigating the sinister connection between the War on Drugs and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Alexander started to focus more firmly on mass incarceration. The title The New Jim Crow refers to the fact that the War on Drugs is a racist response to the Civil Rights movement just as the original Jim Crow was a direct response to emancipation. Rhetoric related to the War on Drugs presented a narrative that drove fears deep within the mind of the American public: centering on inner city urban ghettos filled with African Americans using and selling drugs. These narratives represented gross distortions of the truth, just as Jim Crow propaganda would present black males as moral threats to an otherwise innocent white society.
In The New Jim Crow, the author also argues that mass incarceration is a sinister means of social control, and subtle method...
New Jim Crow When considering the introduction and chapter three of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, arguably the most important conceptional foundation to remember is the notion of social oppression, and particularly the fact that social oppression can occur with or without the knowledge or intention of the dominant social group. As Hardiman, Jackson, and Griffin note in their contribution to Readings
New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness offers a scathing and disturbing portrait of institutionalized racism in the United States. In an article written for the Huffington Post that supplements her book, Alexander states plainly: "There are more African-Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the
Mass Incarceration in Arizona: Trends and History Mass incarceration is an example of one of the more profound injustices of our time. Arizona is one of the states in America that currently struggles with mass incarceration, as its penal system has spiraled out of control, becoming a factor of injustice, rather than a necessary and notable part of the justice system. This paper will look at how the penal system has
New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, is a professor at Union Theological Seminary, a New York Times columnist, and civil rights lawyer and advocate. I believe that the motive she had in writing her book was to explain how Jim Crow still exists in America even though people sometimes choose not to see it. It exists today in hidden and not-so-hidden ways, as it is
Introduction Race has always been a cultural factor in the U.S. and it is certainly a factor in today’s criminal justice system. James (2018:30) has shown that current “research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans with threat” (30). A significantly higher percentage of the African American population is incarcerated than any other population in the U.S. And, worse, as Lopez (2018) points out, “Black people
Racism / Prejudice Anyone that is not aware of the recent protest demonstrations in cities across the United States -- resulting from the killing of unarmed African-Americans by police in Ferguson Missouri and New York City -- are simply not paying attention to the contemporary events. These killings -- and the failure of grand juries in both cities to indict the blameworthy officers -- have stirred the conscious of millions of
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