Book Summary: The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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. This allowed me to see if that book would give me the information I was looking for. With the help of my mother, we looked through each book on the shelf, but none of the books had the information

I scoured the site using searches like racial perception, white supremacy, and racist people. I found several books that fit my topic, since they talked about racism in the United States and how people perceived minorities, especially immigrants. I took my time looking through the books and settled on a book titled The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This book took a different view by looking at how the government views laws that affect racism. The book was trying to convey how racial perception in the eyes of the United States Government had many of the same features back during the days of the Jim Crow Laws. This book gave new information of racial perception and also gave me a different point of view of on

African Americans are more likely to be searched than a Caucasia due to racial bias from Caucasian officers. To most officers, a Caucasian does not look as suspicious as an African American which makes them more susceptible to searches. Even if a Caucasian is searched and caught for having illegal drugs, the consequences are usually not as bad for them. In fact, in Chicago alone, “White drug offenders are rarely arrested” and when they are caught and brought to court “they are treated more favorably at every stage of the criminal justice process” (189). All across the nation, African Americans are filling up our county jails at a higher rate than any other race in the United States, which is better known as mass incarceration. This is truly unfair since we do not know the true ratio between how many actual Caucasians should be in jail with African