Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

Brian Dwyer
07/14/2017
History 5566
Critical Book Review: The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, writes about how African Americans in the US are still marginally oppressed. Alexander claims that the prison system and laws in America are one of the primary ways that blacks are still in a state of slavery. She says how being, “colorblind” is a nice idea, but does not serve the need to emancipate African Americans from oppression. Alexander does a good job keeping things current, and talking about how our systems are built to hold blacks down, but does not go into much detail about how to fix the issue at hand. She says, nobody likes to talk about race, but we will be unable to move past these issues until we

While working for the ACLU her main missions were to create equality in education and criminal justice for African Americans. She talks about her personal experience with racial bias, politically, economically, and socially. Before writing The New Jim Crow, Alexander was the main creator of her campaigns against racial profiling by law enforcement, which she called, “Driving While Black or Brown”. Alexander graduated from Stanford Law school, and attended Vanderbilt University. In addition to working at the ACLU, Michelle worked as a lawyer, specializing in lawsuits that had to do with race and gender discrimination. She is a writer, public speaker, and mother of three children, which she often refers to in her

It is painful for me to think that I have a part in the oppression of African Americans in the USA. I read books about Reconstruction, The Civil War, lynching, and the Jim Crow laws, and think, “thank god, we don’t live in that world anymore.” Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that we do live in a world where there in still slavery, it is just more subverted then in the 1900’s. Not all people are lawyers and can commit themselves to legal battles. There needs to be a way that white people, and the working class, can stand to change the ways this country oppresses minorities. Sure, this has been more than a century long battle, but education is important. This book serves it purpose, and Michelle Alexander’s aim of educating people on the oppressive legal systems in America, is met. Alexander says, “Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.” We must change the