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Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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In the book, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, readers are given a look at the long and extensive history of racism towards African-Americans. From there, the reader is shown how racism towards African-Americans has not gone away and is still very much common in modern society. Throughout the novel, Alexander argues and discusses how African-Americans are being discriminated against in the form of mass incarceration. “Mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison” (Alexander 14). The War On Drugs can largely be put to blame for the increase in incarcerations. President Reagan throughout his campaign and presidency used sly and covert language to appeal to the racists and discredit people of color. …show more content…

Reagan’s comments surrounding people of color, specifically African-Americans did nothing but further tolerance and acceptance of racism. With no one discrediting Reagan and his commentary, he was enabled to make racial divides even worse with the War on Drugs. At this time in history, “less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation”. (33) Even with such low statistics and data, Reagan pushed for the War on Drugs and allowed for vast amounts of African-Americans to be criminalized and incarcerated. Upon reading The New Jim Crow, it is not difficult to see how African–Americans still continue to be discriminated against. The ways in which they are discriminated against may be more hidden to public eyes but they are most definitely there and are being deemed and viewed as acceptable by the criminal justice

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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.

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According to the article, The Drug War, Mass Incarceration, and Race “ Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population,10 and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races.11 But black people comprise 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations,12 and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated”. Despite the fact that colored people are minorities in the country still, make up 1/3 of the people arrested because of the drug policy. The policy effective created to target the minorities by making the cocaine the main focus of the drug. “America of the poor, where, amid hopelessness and lack of education, people will suffer the worst consequences of cocaine”(Kerr, 1) which in many poor communities lived the colored minorities, this made it easier for the police officer to target and arrest the

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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.

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However, black men are arrested and charged for drug offenses at, “rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men” (Alexander, 2010). This discrepancy raises questions as to why are black men targeted for drug offenses more than all other races when black people use and sell drugs at similar rates as the other demographics. Mass incarceration stemmed from the influx of arrests made in the 1980’s and 90’s; these hordes of people put into prisons means more than just time behind

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However, a number of African Americans, who were convicted of a felony, are disproportionately high nowadays. Michelle Alexander considers that It has led to the creation of “a new racial undercaste” (2010). Actually, in our time, discrimination affects every aspect of political, economic, and social life of the people who was charged with a serious criminal offence. In this regard, she mentions the law “banning drug felons from public housing …and denying them basic public benefits for life” (2010). We live in a “colorblind society” that pretends the racial disparity and discrimination do not exist.

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In Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she analyzes the use of the War on Drugs to not truly be against crack, but those of a minority; as well as considering the shift of using race to describe and discriminate in the Criminal Justice System, and in society. On top of the switch of who is able to define someone as colored, the Criminal Justice System is in a sense, the new Jim Crowe, seeing that the system affects those in the minority groups more than those who are not. It used to be that the everyday person could describe a person by their race or skin tone, which would then group minorities by their described race. Grouping these people made discrimination stronger, especially when history of how these people were treated is

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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).

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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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Throughout the book the author presents the readers with a point of view showing the discrimination that still exists in America today. The original Jim Crow Laws enforced segregation in America; she is interpreting the war on drugs as “The New Jim Crow.” The author begins by explaining how she thinks that although as a country

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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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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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In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American

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America, the land of the free, but is that true? The book The New Jim Crow raises many questions and forces its readers to reconsider the way we think about our judicial systems. Michelle Alexander brings up 6 main themes that we need to consider, the first one being The New Jim Crow. This is the main theme of the author’s work. She believes that our current American system of mass incarceration due to the rise in drug related arrested, is an attempt to neglect people of color, the same way that the Jim Crow laws had targeted African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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