Summary Of The New Jim Crow

The United States has entered a new era in which the gap between rich and poor is broadening quickly. The New Jim Crow is about the inequality and discriminatory racism towards minorities, especially African Americans. Alexander also discussed the birth and result of social control by the institutions of the criminal justice in America. Harvey and Alexander analysied the expolitive aspects of capitalist prodcution and the historical legacy of facism in America that gets trapped into by law enforcement, the courts, corrections, and oridinary people. The mass incarceration in the United States, grew hand in hand with the well-disguised scheme of racialized social control that works similarly to Jim Crow. Through a systematic approach reinforce

Alexander uses the term “racial caste” to characterize a branded ethnic group confined into an inferior position by law and order. Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems and so is our current system of mass incarceration. Alexander describes how differently the criminal justice is portrayed in TV then how it actually functions. The criminal justice system has weakened Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and augmented police authority have all expedited the development of a lawful caste system, by disregarding basic civil rights. Americans of all races sell and use illegal drugs at outstandingly similar rates. Yet the fact is that African Americans are incarcerated, on probation, or parole in numbers unacceptably disproportionate to the population. The official explanation for the inequality is: higher crime rates among African Americans, which is consistent with dominant racial accounts going back to slavery. African Americans, are exposed to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods, resulting in jaw-dropping figures of African Americans and Latinos filling the nation’s prisons and jails every

On one hand, David Harvey supposes a revolution is necessary for change to happen. But on the another hand, a revolution seems to overlook the way activity spheres understand society and social behaviors into the capitalist world. One of the many important aspects of this book is Harvey’s classification, and delineation of the significance, of seven activity spheres. Harvey argues that capital cannot circulate or accumulate without touching “upon each and all of these activity spheres”. These spheres are: “technologies and organizational forms; social relations; institutional and administrative arrangements; production and labor processes; relations to nature; the reproduction of daily life and of the species; and mental conceptions of the world”. No one of these spheres dominates even as none of them are independent of the others. But nor is any one of them determined even collectively by all of the others. Activity spheres play a role in the evolution of capitalism, each sphere evolves “on its own account but always in dynamic interaction with the others”. Capitalism has been able to be evoluntionary and revoluntioary at the equivalent time. An analysis of the co-evolution of activity spheres provides a framework within which to think through the overall evolution