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. It is not very impressionable to make a big claim without proof. For example, the Alexander claims, “What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a percentage of them are not free to move up at all” (pg. 13). When I thought about the credibility if the author while reading the book, I realised that the whole Introduction of the book had no given citations. In addition, the introduction brings up a lot of claims for this particular argument. Furthermore, this claim could make people who do not have much knowledge on mass incarceration think …show more content…
When providing an argument-based book, it is important that you are trying to convince different demographics for a good reputation as an author. Throwing numbers and phrases like “a percentage” without cited sources is useless in convincing a reader of an argument. The author did not want people to think that she was not credible if she wrote a 300-page book on a certain topic. This book would have been much better if there were smaller amounts of unsupported/biased