Introduction Michelle Alexanders’ book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, explores the emergence of a new racial caste system in the United States, mass incarceration. She explores mass incarceration as a form of racial control that functions in contemporary society, even as it operates under the principle of colorblindness, which is a central theme within the book. Another central theme that Alexander discusses throughout the course of her book is the societal misconception that progress has been made and that racial disparities no longer exist within American institutions. This book thoroughly examines the connections between the racial history of the United States and the new racial caste system. Theme One …show more content…
But, Barack Obama was seen by the American public as an “exception,” as he separated himself from his racial identity to seem more acceptable to the U.S. voters (Carter & Dowe, 2015). This is harmful because it portrays the idea that in order to be successful as a Black American, one must fully submit to white society and create an identity that is palatable to the racist culture of the United States. Because of this, Obama’s election can not be used as evidence of true progress being made in American society. Though the racial caste system seemingly ended after the Jim Crow era, it simply took a different form. There are many similarities between Jim Crow and mass incarceration, like legalized discrimination and segregation. Black communities in America are fragmented due to mass incarceration and being physically segregated not only into prisons, but into low-income, environmentally dangerous …show more content…
Learning about relevant history and how certain things came to be is a significant part of gaining a better critical understanding of certain types of oppression in contemporary society. For example, a thorough understanding of the War on Drugs is necessary to understand how mass incarceration currently functions in American society. I feel as though this is something that I have personally been lacking in my efforts to become more educated about the different forms of oppression impacting minority communities, as I tend to push the historical contexts of these issues of oppression to the side. This book has shown me just how crucial it is to be historically aware, as this awareness plays a key role in understanding how to be an informed, useful advocate. Connected to my prior lack of historical context, I had not understood mass incarceration to be a form of social control or a caste system before reading The New Jim Crow. Lastly, throughout this book, Alexander acknowledges a struggle that I have been experiencing while preparing for my future in the social work
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).
Professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, writes that a racial caste system existing in America reflect the Jim Crow laws that were "separate but equal" from the time of the Civil War until the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the mid 1960's and which continue today. She is a graduate from Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University and clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Subsequently, she was on the faculty of Sanford Law School serving as the Director of the Civil Rights Clinic before receiving a Soros Justice Fellowship and an appointment to the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Professor Alexander has litigated civil rights cases in private practice while associated with at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller law firm, with additional advocacy through the non-profit sector, as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California.
Coates’ article “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” opens with the story of a man named Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan, born to a broken family in the great depression era, entered politics and developed to become an important political figure in the labor department during the 1960’s. The principal belief of Moynihan was that unemployment was destructive to the potential social mobility of the poor, a lynchpin of the American dream. Once the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moynihan gained interest on how his theory affects black families specifically and began to research this topic. The results of his research showed just how devastating the effects of three hundred of years of slavery and institutionalized racism were on black families and how much worse off they were than white families in general.
Michelle Alexander wrote a book called "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." The original Jim Crow was a racial caste system that segregated whites from blacks, where whites were privileged and viewed as the chosen ones while blacks were taught to be minority and used as servants between 1877 and the 1960s. The Jim Crow system kept whites superior to blacks with laws created to keep whites favored. It was a legal way to prevent African Americans from getting an equal education, from voting; it was a system of "Separate but Equal". In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed to outlaw discrimination due to ones skin color. Although this act was passed we still continue to live in a society where discrimination is quite relevant but systemized. Through Michelle Alexander's book we can understand her argument that there is a new form of legal discrimination although laws state that discriminating an individual because of their race is illegal. Michelle explains that there is a current mass incarceration among black men in the United States. The use of, possession of, or selling drugs is illegal but it has been systematically created that laws make it impossible to. She claims that the criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a way to discriminate and repress the black man.
“The New Jim Crow” is an article by Michelle Alexander, published by the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. Michelle is a professor at the Ohio State Moritz college of criminal law as well as a civil rights advocate. Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law is part of the world’s top education system, is accredited by the American Bar Association, and is a long-time member of the American Law association. The goal of “The New Jim Crow” is to inform the public about the issues of race in our country, especially our legal system. The article is written in plain English, so the common person can fully understand it, but it also remains very professional. Throughout the article, Alexander provides factual information about racial issues in our country. She relates them back to the Jim Crow era and explains how the large social problem affects individual lives of people of color all over the country. By doing this, Alexander appeals to the reader’s ethos, logos, and pathos, forming a persuasive essay that shifts the understanding and opinions of all readers.
From slavery being legal, to its abolishment and the Civil Rights Movement, to where we are now in today’s integrated society, it would seem only obvious that this country has made big steps in the adoption of African Americans into American society. However, writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin who have lived and documented in between this timeline of events bringing different perspectives to the surface. Du Bois first introduced an idea that Baldwin would later expand, but both authors’ works provide insight to the underlying problem: even though the law has made African Americans equal, the people still have not.
Although an effort is made in connecting with the blacks, the idea behind it is not in understanding the blacks and their culture but rather is an exploitative one. It had an adverse impact on the black community by degrading their esteem and status in the community. For many years, the political process also had been influenced by the same ideas and had ignored the black population in the political process (Belk, 1990). America loves appropriating black culture — even when black people themselves, at times, don’t receive much love from America.
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander states that we still use our criminal justice system to “label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage i...
The work by Victor M. Rios entitled Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness depict ways in which policing and incarceration affect inequalities that exist in society. In this body of work I will draw on specific examples from the works of Victor M. Rios and Michelle Alexander to fulfill the tasks of this project. Over the course of the semester and by means of supplemental readings, a few key points are highlighted: how race and gender inequalities correlate to policing and incarceration, how laws marginalize specific groups, and lastly how policing and incarceration perpetuate the very inequalities that exist within American society.
Today, more African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (Alexander 180). Throughout history, there have been multiple racial caste systems in the United States. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander defines a “racial caste” as “a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). Alexander argues that both Jim Crow and slavery functioned as racial caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration functions as a similar caste system, which she labels “The New Jim Crow”. There is now a silent Jim Crow in our nation.
Many Americans pretend that the days of racism are far behind; however it is clear that institutional racism still exists in this country. One way of viewing this institutional racism is looking at our nation’s prison system and how the incarceration rates are skewed towards African American men. The reasons for the incarceration rate disparity are argued and different between races, but history points out and starts to show the reason of why the disparity began. Families and children of the incarcerated are adversely affected due to the discrimination as well as the discrimination against African American students and their likelihood of going to prison compared to the white student. African American women are also affected by the discrimination in the incarceration rate. Many white Americans don’t see how racism affects incarceration rates, and that African Americans are more likely to face discrimination from the police as well as being falsely arrested.
From the study, Michelle Alexander’s argument is true and correct that the mass incarcerations are just a representation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow has just been redesigned as the blacks have continued to be mistreated and denied some of the rights and privileges that their counterparts enjoy. There is discernment against the African Americans towards different privileges which are essential to their lives. This discrimination is political as leaders steer operations that are aimed at racially discriminating people from particular groups of race.
Jim Crow, a series of laws put into place after slavery by rich white Americans used in order to continue to subordinate African-Americans has existed for many years and continues to exist today in a different form, mass incarceration. Jim Crow laws when initially implemented were a series of anti-black laws that help segregate blacks from whites and kept blacks in a lower social, political, and economic status. In modern day, the term Jim Crow is used as a way to explain the mass incarcerations of blacks since Jim Crow laws were retracted. Through mass incarceration, blacks are continuously disenfranchised and subordinated by factors such as not being able to obtain housing, stoppage of income, and many other factors. Both generations of Jim Crow have been implemented through legal laws or ways that the government which helps to justify the implementation of this unjust treatment of blacks.
Print. The. Alexander, Michelle. A. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
In the wake of President Obama’s election, the United States seems to be progressing towards a post-racial society. However, the rates of mass incarceration of black males in America deem this to be otherwise. Understanding mass incarceration as a modern racial caste system will reveal the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy America. The history of social control in the United States dates back to the first racial caste systems: slavery and the Jim Crow Laws. Although these caste systems were outlawed by the 13th amendment and Civil Rights Act respectively, they are given new life and tailored to the needs of the time.In other words, racial caste in America has not ended but has merely been redesigned in the shape of mass incarceration. Once again, the fact that more than half of the young black men in many large American cities are under the control of the criminal justice system show evidence of a new racial caste system at work. The structure of the criminal justice system brings a disproportionate number of young black males into prisons, relegating them to a permanent second-class status, and ensuring there chances of freedom are slim. Even when minorities are released from prisons, they are discriminated against and most usually end up back in prisons . The role of race in criminal justice system is set up to discriminate, arrest, and imprison a mass number of minority men. From stopping, searching, and arresting, to plea bargaining and sentencing it is apparent that in every phases of the criminal justice system race plays a huge factor. Race and structure of Criminal Justice System, also, inhibit the integration of ex offenders into society and instead of freedom, relea...