Michelle Alexander War On Drugs Summary

Michelle Alexander starts her book by taking us on a trip back in time to the start of it all: the Civil War. Now, we all learned about the Civil War in middle school and high school and how the great Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery and freed all the African Americans with the Emancipation Proclamation. In chapter 1, she really touches on this and on history, the beginning and end of slavery and the beginning and end of the Jim Crow Laws.
Refreshing our minds of our country’s history and how the Jim Crow Laws came to end with Brown vs. Board of Education. She mentions this idea of a caste system and how it revolves around the color of one’s skin. Going off this idea that the caste system is based off race, she breaks it down into three parts:

slavery, Jim Crow and the mass incarceration. Michelle then goes into detail about each of the topics and talks about segregation is making an approach in today’s society, or how they never really left.
She gives examples throughout the book about how the economy is collapsing, racism is still very much alive, how there is a war on drugs and the amount of money going into drugs is increasing. The main idea that revolves all these categories is how the incarceration of African Americans has increased. When the average person is asked to imagine a criminal, most of the time, unintentionally, they picture an African American man. What Michelle Alexander does is explain why this is and how this came to be.
She explains how long it took her to realize how the very phenomenon she is explaining.

She describes that the mass incarceration policies that were made are a “comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”(Alexander2016). The War on Drugs escalated quickly in 1982 with the Reagan administration, claiming that they were responding to the crack cocaine epidemic that was going on around black neighborhoods and ghettos. The Reagan administration actually were contributing to the high rise of crack cocaine consumption in the US, mainly inner cities. Alexander points out that the Drug on War had escalated way before 1982, in the mid 1980’s the use of crack cocaine had escalated so quickly that they Federal Drug authorities had to publicize the issue and use scare tactics to try to get control over the

situation.
The CIA recognized that in the 1980’s they were smuggling cocaine into the US and distributing it into various cities, when they tried to stop the smuggling of cocaine and expose the truth to the public, the Reagan officials stopped them.

Since the Reagan officials tried harder to stop the Drug Enforcement Administration from exposing the illegal activities that were taking place, the more violence was being caused in these inner city neighborhoods, which lead to more arrests for possession. Now, Michelle explains how the War on Drugs has the most impact on African Americans in these inner city neighborhoods. Within the past three decades, US incarceration increase has been due to drug convictions, mainly. She states that, “the US is unparalleled in the world in focusing enforcement of federal drug laws on racial and ethnic minorities.”(Alexander2016). The percentile of African American men with some sort of criminal record is about 80% in some of our major US cities(Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago Urban League, Department of Research and Planning, 2002). MIchelle referred to these becoming marginalized and calls them “ growing and permanent undercaste.” (Alexander2016, pp

6-7).
Throughout the book, from what I read and took from it, is that the Jim Crow laws are hidden within our society, A lot of us might not choose to notice it, because as Americans, we like to think we overcame such a horrible even in our past time and we like to think times have changed. In reality, they might have never left. Like stated before, 80% of African Americans have some sort of criminal record and there is a great percentile of African Americans serving time in prison. It might not be okay to use race as a justification for discrimination, but if you’re a criminal it makes it totally okay to discriminate you.
By falling back into old ways and targeting African American men, “we have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it”(Alexander2016). African Americans have had a lot of achievements throughout the years, one of them being Obama becoming the first African American president. She talks about how, as a country, we are ashamed of our history and how we’ve treated “our” people and the past and therefore try to ignore anything that has to do with race. We say that we learn from our mistakes, but we always end up making those same mistakes again and the phrase “history repeats itself” come to play.
The way she goes about exposing this caste system is interesting. She really opens your eyes and makes you think about our history and how uncomfortable we feel when a situation arises that has to do with race. I found the book to be really dry though, I didn’t want to read it. It was hard for me to understand some of the language she was using and try to keep up with what she was saying. I had to re-read some of the paragraphs, and more than often, some of the chapters to try to grasp what she was trying to say. It was really difficult for me to really get into the book. It was an interesting topic to focus on and I really did learn and realize some things I never have before, really opened a new perspective. I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone, I think if the book wasn’t so dry it would actually be a good book.
I did like how she started off talking about the beginning and end of slavery and with some of our history. It was a good refresher and it helps when she goes back and forth and makes connections between then and now. I also liked the connections she made. They weren’t connections I would have ever thought of and would have recognized on my own. Like I’ve said throughout this whole paper, she really does open your eyes and make you realize that this caste system is alive as ever, especially now in this generation.