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The New Jim Crow Chapter Summary

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Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow is a truly thought provoking book attempting to show the enduring issues of racial inequalities in our Criminal Justice system. Racial inequality in America is a huge and controversial topic, especially in reference to America’s system of Criminal justice. In “The New Jim Crow” Alexander focuses on the racial undertones of America’s “War on drugs”. Alexander uses the chapters of her book to take us on a journey through America’s racial history and argues that the federal drug policy unjustly targets black communities. Alexander begins her book by thoroughly giving us a synopsis of the role of African American’s in American History. She begins by disproving claims that would like Americans to believe that racism is extinct. In the first couple paragraphs …show more content…

Alexander argues that the practice of racial injustice and segregation is due to the existence of mass incarceration. She goes into great detail in her writing, explaining why she believes mass incarceration is the issue and how history show us that America will always find a way to separate racial communities. This book would serve as an excellent reference to anyone studying racial injustice, mass incarceration, plea bargain coercion, racial history in America, and more. The beauty of this book is not only Alexander’s fact finding revelations, is the fact that she isn’t saying anything unheard of or anything that has not been realized by member of poor black communities, she simply found a way to articulate the issue in a way the demanded consideration from readers in and outside the communities being discussed. Alexander finds a way to expose the true nature of the criminal justice system using the people’s voice and research. “The New Jim Crow” is definitely a must read for anyone interested or involved in the criminal justice

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In America, criminal justice has been an issue for generations. People are convicted of crimes and their convictions are oftentimes based on their race and/or social status. Unfortunately, it is a reality that the criminal justice system privileges those who are “rich and guilty rather than if they are poor and innocent. Many African American men and women have suffered due to this. In the book Just Mercy and the movie 13th, both sources give great examples of how the criminal justice system continues to overlook the truth to keep black Americans incarcerated.

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At the end of March, Annie Valk and Leslie Brown presented a lecture about their book, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South at Craven Community College. Before the lecture ended, they provided an opportunity to attendees to ask questions or give comments about the material covered. Many attendees described their experiences and their ancestors’ with segregation. They had very strong feelings about the events that occurred, and members of the chapter wondered if it was possible to bring closure to what was discussed. The chapter voted to focus on the Great Fire of New Bern in 1922.

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1080 Words | 5 Pages

It has been over a decade since Michelle Alexander published “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Her book delves into the complex nuances of mass incarceration in the United States, more specifically pertaining to the criminal justice system’s deeply-ingrained racial biases. She argues, as in reference to the title of her work, that mass incarceration effectively serves as a new form of Jim Crow discrimination and calls for large-scale reform. But in the time since the book’s original release, there have been many significant developments in terms of policy, public opinion, and social movements which warrant elaboration on the themes originally discussed by Alexander. In chapter 3 of “The New Jim Crow,” the

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924 Words | 4 Pages

The fourth chapter explores how the system of mass incarceration affects African American communities both during incarceration and after being released with the title of being a felon. The fifth chapter is where the author explains the title of the book, being the idea of how the “Age of Colorblindness” has created a world where the discrimination is harder to witness from the outside since it is under the disguise of the criminal justice system. This chapter also compares the potential for harm in the modern system to the harm that came from the Jim Crow laws. The sixth and final chapter explores the ideas of how the status quo in society makes it harder to dismantle the system of mass

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699 Words | 3 Pages

Jim Crow was not a person, it was a series of laws that imposed legal segregation between white Americans and African Americans in the American South. It promoting the status “Separate but Equal”, but for the African American community that was not the case. African Americans were continuously ridiculed, and were treated as inferiors. Although slavery was abolished in 1865, the legal segregation of white Americans and African Americans was still a continuing controversial subject and was extended for almost a hundred years (abolished in 1964). Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South is a series of primary accounts of real people who experienced this era first-hand and was edited by William H.Chafe, Raymond

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She first supports her claim by chronicling America 's history of institutionalized racism and systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans. Then, she discusses America 's War on Drugs that disproportionately targets minorities and finally as she examines the hardship faced by felons she compares and contrasts Jim Crow Laws to mass incarceration. Alexander surmises that mass incarceration is designed to maintain white supremacy and sustain a racial classification system. Alexander 's book is relevant to my research paper because she provides evidence that the criminal justice system is rooted in racism and directly linked to the racist agenda of the white supremacist. Broussard, B. (2015).

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1517 Words | 7 Pages

Over the second half of this State and Local Government course we have been reading and discussing The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Her overarching theme for this book has been incarceration, and its purpose is to change the way we think about the world and its systems. All of our class discussions on incarceration and all it entails, led me to wonder what the connection between incarceration and crime is. In this paper I will be using multiple sources that have to do with crime and incarceration in order to find out how incarceration relates to crime rates and if incarceration is the reason for crime decline. I will go over all the information I found on this topic including my findings on incarceration, including statistics and rates,

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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439 Words | 2 Pages

AP ENGLISH Per-7 Rajdeep SIngh The New Jim Crow By, Michelle Alexander Publisher-The New Press The book I have chosen is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This novel is basically telling us (the readers) that racism back then and the racism now has not changed much but it is improving.

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718 Words | 3 Pages

We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way

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Although studies prove that all ethnicities use drugs at about the same rate, the drug laws are enforced overwhelmingly against people of color. Alexander posits that this is not an accident and, rather, the war on drugs is purposefully the latest incarnation of America’s racial caste system. The language had to change because discrimination again a person based on color is illegal; however, Alexander lays out a plethora of evidence to show that drug-war rhetoric is used to oppress people of color the exact same way as Jim Crow laws once were. Instead, of explicit discriminatory laws, Fourth Amendment rights were disintegrated in the name of drug interdiction; there was a rise in exploitation of asset-forfeiture laws; and police forces appear

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1381 Words | 6 Pages

Race is one the most sensitive and controversial topics of our time. As kids, we were taught that racism has gotten better as times has passed. However, the author, Michelle Alexander, of The New Jim Crow proposes the argument that racism has not gotten better, but the form of racism that we known in textbooks is not the racism we experience today. Michelle Alexander has countless amounts of plausible arguments, but she has failed to be a credible author, since she doesn’t give enough citations or evidence for her argument to convince people who may not have prior agreement with her agreement.. Alexander’s biggest mistake when it came to being a credible author was starting off the book with a countless number of claims without any evidence in her Introduction.

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1721 Words | 7 Pages

Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

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562 Words | 3 Pages

For example, open Black support of harsh punishment and law enforcement may seem hypocritical because in reality these policies and practices contribute to mass incarceration of Blacks. Alexander clarifies that Black support is more complex than it appears and can be attributed to a combination of complicity and wanting better safety for their communities and families (Alexander, 2012, p.210). Alexander also offers a unique perspective throughout the entire book by explaining how the systems of slavery and oppression have affected White individuals and not merely in the form of privilege or the dismissal of White people as simply as racist individuals. I resonated with one particular section discussing the "White victims of racial caste" (Alexander, 2012, p.204); the author 's anecdote of a white woman falling in love with a Black man and due to miscegenation laws could not have children. I could relate to this story on a deeply personal level in that my own parents experienced extreme and countless hurdles due to their interracial relationship and having biracial

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1075 Words | 5 Pages

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American

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