Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Racism against African americans
Black equality in america
Racism against African americans
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Chapter 1 of “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, that is also a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, wrote this chapter to inform us the history of racism in America, and if African Americans really treated equally. When the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, many whites were scared that the slaves are now free because they might want revenge, so the whites made a stereo type that all black men are criminals. When the Reconstruction ended, the south had a redemption. The convicts had no legal rights, so they became the “slaves” to help rebuild after the civil war. Then the prison population of blacks rose so the whites can use them as free labor.
The New Jim Crow When looking for a book about racial perception I wanted to find a book that looks at racial perception from a different perspective that I had not thought of. This information would need to be new and fresh and be able to open me up to new questions on racial perception. The first stop I made was to Ygnacio Valley Library. Looking around was not very difficult since racism and world conflicts have a shelf dedicated to themselves. I searched through the first couple pages of different books and took a glance at the table of contents.
Michelle Alexander wrote the book called, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the publication is in New York and the publisher is The New Press, which is the second edition, it was published in the year of 2012 and the book has 312 pages. On October 7, 1967, Michelle Alexander was born. She is a graduate from Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. She is a civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. She is a professor who has taught at a many universities.
The New Jim Crow was written by Michelle Alexander and was created to educate people on the new “caste system” that is being ignored by those it has no effect on. It is a serious discussion that has been avoided for far too long. Michelle Alexander did a great job getting the ball rolling on this topic in her book. To touch on some of the points made I will be looking at the foreword, introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 6.
The piece of writing which I felt was unsuccessful for me was the Rhetorical Analysis of an article relating to a topic from our course book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This piece of writing was difficult for me to organize my ideas around. The article that I decided to use for my rhetorical analysis highlighted mass incarceration among African American and the effect of civil liberties being are taken away from these individuals. I had a lot of repetition because many of the examples I used demonstrated more than one type of appeal. I found myself repeating what the purpose of the example was and how it demonstrated proper use of ethos, pathos, and logos.
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
politan Transition Center Historically known as the Maryland Penitentiary, is a minimum security prison for people who violated parole or just got arrested and are awaiting trial. 2. Compare/ Contrast the field visit with what you have learned reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Some similarities I saw when going on the tour and reading the book is the minorities almost filled the jail up in D block.
In The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, American writer and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander argues that a new racial caste system was born in the United States after the death of Jim Crow. A system that was caused by the war on drugs, which was created in 1971 by President Ronald Reagan, as well as the Fourth Amendment. Alexander conveys her argument that the war on drugs, and the government's disregard for the Fourth Amendment, led to the unfortunate birth of mass incarceration using logical and ethical appeals. In the beginning of the excerpt, Alexander discusses the Terry v. Ohio decision and how it limited the effectiveness of the Fourth Amendment when it comes to drug crimes.
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.
While I was viewing these articles, I really started to get angry inside. I understood all this exists, but reading it over and over again brings me back to remember how serious this situation is. Many of these topics was covered in the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, but these articles are bringing up topics that I never even considered. Such as, in the Silverstein’s article it said “Discrimination has been shown to increase the risk of stress, depression, the common cold, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and mortality. ”(Silverstein)
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.
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.
Just four years after the first juvenile court was established, W.E.B. DuBois, in 1903, wrote that the problem of the 20th century was the color line (DuBois, 2005). More than a century later, in 2012, Michelle Alexander wrote in her book “The New Jim Crow” that she had somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that a racial caste system still exists in the United States and is responsible for the disproportionate number of minorities in the criminal justice system (Alexander, 2012). Somewhat more than halfway through the 19th century, Jefferson Davis made a statement that clearly shows the problem in a stark manner. In his book tracing racist ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi recalls what Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become the president
Racism Then and Now In the 1930’s the Jim Crow laws had a huge negative impact on America in this time period. And thanks to the Jim Crow laws racism it created a huge divide in society between all the races even after the Civil war. Even though racism still isn’t as bad as it use to be, it still exist today in America. The Jim Crow laws affected America in the 1930’s and today by creating stereotypes, it created conflict and and unfair judgments with different races, and brought segregation into America.
Slavery is over therefore how can racism still exist? This has been a question posed countlessly in discussions about race. What has proven most difficult is adequately demonstrating how racism continues to thrive and how forms of oppression have manifested. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues that slavery has not vanished; it instead has taken new forms that allowed it to flourish in modern society. These forms include mass incarceration and perpetuation of racist policies and societal attitudes that are disguised as color-blindness that ultimately allow the system of oppression to continue.