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Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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“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 …show more content…

The novel is a conversation between Alexander and the United States Criminal Justice system, white people, people of color; she uses the passion of an activist to talk to the people and inform them that if they care about the future, humanity, and equality, America needs to start paying attention to the lesser-known injustices and microaggressions to make a change in to end the “racial caste system” in which Americans have been living in for far too long. Alexander enhanced a complex topic by effortlessly recounting it without any elementary language or speech. Her work, while easy to comprehend, may still be hard to read for all of the driven language and the truths that she reveals about America’s past, as well as its present. While the book points out that the similarities of our current Justice system to the old Jim Crow Laws are not as stark, Alexander never points out the differences, which makes her analogy incomplete in its full comparison. This may be done for the effect to take the reader’s attention away from the dissimilarities as the United States commonly only focuses on the differences of how people of color were treated then versus now because it is certainly less extreme. If Alexander is trying to stop people from pointing out that yes, black people are no longer slaves so what’s the problem, then her analogy could still work, it is just not as thorough and inclusive as it could be of all of the sides of the story if the differences are never pointed

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First, I want to examine a particularly critical review of Alexander’s text by Joseph D. Osel. According to Joseph D. Osel’s, “while Alexander’s book claims to be concerned with exposing and describing the history and mechanisms of mass incarceration of the American ‘caste system,’ which affect the poor and people of color systematically and disproportionately, her work systematically, strangely, and empathically excludes these voices” (OSEL Whitewash). Osel goes on to contend that Alexander’s work provides the history of criminal justice and imprisonment with a “vast rhetorical and historical facelift where the most relevant and affected voices on the topic at hand are safely expunged from the discussion, from relevance, from history” (OSEL

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Immediately Alexander comes in with a real life case to show how “The more things change, the more they remain the same” (Alexander). She mentions how at one point she would have been skeptical to believing that there was such a thing that could compare to Jim Crow. I believe she made an effort to include this because often people are afraid to admit that they are, or once were, ignorant. By admitting this she was able to see the bigger picture that she now can not “unsee” (Alexander). Another thing that I found interesting was how the “victim” whose story she shared had the last name Cotton.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Michelle Alexander in her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" argues that law enforcement officials routinely racially profile minorities to deny them socially, politically, and economically as was accustomed in the Jim Crow era.

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Chapter 2 She wrote “uncultivated barbarian from Africa” could be civilized, that enslaved Africans “may be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley, 1773). The timeline ends in the 2010’s with “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander. The author wrote” Two years after Obama’s election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to ex-prisoners. This best seller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter(KENDI,2017).” Ibram X Kendi also wrote a booked called “Stamped from the Beginning” which David Olusogo wrote about in his article posted on the Guardian

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a non-fiction introduction in the novel “They say, I say” by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. The New Jim Crow is written to educate society on the discrimination and exclusion that African Americans are facing in the United States; the same discrimination and exclusion they faced when the Jim Crow laws took place. Michelle Alexander forms her evidence from her own experience fighting for the civil rights of others and she also uses people of colors experiences with losing their civil rights from being labeled a “felon” and she uses statistics to help her readers better visualize the extent of African American incarceration, these techniques provide the readers with accurate

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In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

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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.

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The New Jim Crow Analysis

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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.

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For example, open Black support of harsh punishment and law enforcement may seem hypocritical because in reality these policies and practices contribute to mass incarceration of Blacks. Alexander clarifies that Black support is more complex than it appears and can be attributed to a combination of complicity and wanting better safety for their communities and families (Alexander, 2012, p.210). Alexander also offers a unique perspective throughout the entire book by explaining how the systems of slavery and oppression have affected White individuals and not merely in the form of privilege or the dismissal of White people as simply as racist individuals. I resonated with one particular section discussing the "White victims of racial caste" (Alexander, 2012, p.204); the author 's anecdote of a white woman falling in love with a Black man and due to miscegenation laws could not have children. I could relate to this story on a deeply personal level in that my own parents experienced extreme and countless hurdles due to their interracial relationship and having biracial

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