Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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Mass Incarceration Through the Era of Colorblindness In the New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander portrayed a strong and provocative evaluation of the mass incarceration in the United States. When writing this book Alexander wanted to achieve to bring up a much needed conversation of the role that the criminal justice system had in the creation of this new racial caste system as well as show how the consequences of being labeled a felon have simply redesigned the old Jim Crow. She aimed towards the audience of other civil rights activists who hope to work towards racial justice, those of which she believes will be skeptical of what she has to say. She used her own experiences as a civil rights advocate in the regions of racial profiling by law …show more content…

Alexander was rushing to catch a bus to work one morning and saw this bright orange poster on a pole that was encouraging people to join in on a community meeting titled: "The Drug War Is The New Jim Crow." She dismissed it as a silly claim mainly because as a successful black woman with a well-paying job as an attorney living in a nice neighborhood she had no reason to believe these things were still an issue. I believed she showed a lot of arrogance here and believed she thought she was better than everyone else. But once she went onto further research, Alexander came to grasp the concept and realized how the War on Drugs was blamed more on black and brown people and how secluded the middle and upper class were from the terrors of the lives poor people dealt with living in the city. She provided this to get other activists to understand the War on Drugs as a kind of complex web with a variety of interlocking and intersecting points that're designed to work for those in favor of law enforcement. Alexander displayed how this "war" is conveyed out in the context of a vastly ghettoized society, whereas successful middle-class white and blacks like herself how zero contact with people of color. What she wanted to illustrate was how poor black and brown people are viewed through a different lens of that of the more privileged