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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a book outlining and analysing the social constructs of the United States of America through the context of mechanics of the judicial system. It compares and contrasts the slavery, old Jim Crow law and post Jim Crow law eras in the means to highlight the racial discrimination against the Black and Brown community by the White elite. The author explores the court cases and legislation passed by the government to implement a national system geared to favor the White community and its effects on the imagery that has developed in the American mind set. Michelle Alexander is among many things an African-American woman. She is lawyer who represented in the Civil Rights era.
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” Summary “The New Jim Crow” was written by Michelle Alexander based off of her experience working for the ACLU of Oakland in which she saw racial bias in the justice system that constituted people of color second-class citizens; Which is why the comparison had been made to the Jim Crow laws that existed in the nineteenth century. Alexander notes comparisons in white resentment, colorblind language, segregation in neighborhoods, legal discrimination, etc., while the difference are the lack of activism that is shown in response to these injustices. Goes over the entire history of slavery; Documenting the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, and then the civil rights movement to the War on Drugs that Reagan, in 1980, began in order
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.
Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow In “The New Jim Crow”, author Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs is just an excuse to target African Americans and keep millions of black people in poverty or in jail. Alexander thinks that racism is still very prevalent in today’s world. She believes that the criminal justice system uses the system of mass incarceration to control black people and exclude them from the political process. Many African American people are not allowed to vote because they have gone to jail and they are labeled felons for life.
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
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).
In the opening of the introduction of The New Jim Crow the author clearly outlines the power of one race to another for example how the great-great grandfather of Jarvis’s Cotton was denied to vote for being a slave (Alexander 2010). The great grandfather of Jarvis’s beaten to death by the Klan for attempting to vote (Alexander 2010) and Jarvis himself could not vote because he was labeled as a felon. Most offenders today that get out from prison face discrimination in voting, employment, housing and receiving public assistance linking toward the Jim Crow era. Most incarcerated individuals are still racially segregated which racial bias still exist in our criminal justice system today not only in the Southern states. Some people still believe
Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination
one person, it may not be evil to another. Nonetheless, social evil, evil acts, are done everyday and will continue to happen. Also because evil can be considered anything nowadays with an abundance of different belief systems in this country, and all over the world, evil acts are always happening and will continue to happen. Mass incarceration and police brutality are just a few social evils that are being committed in the United States that are really changing us as a society and what ‘The New Jim Crow’ has to do with it. As I stated before, social evils are issues in which in one way or another affects members of a society and is often considered controversial or problematic in terms of moral values.
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
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.
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.
