The New Jim Crow Book Summary

Racial discrimination is a topic that has dominated the United States since independence, more than two centuries ago. It is important to remember that the country went into the Civil War mainly because of racism as the Southerners did not want to end slavery. One hundred years later, the country experienced the largest Civil Movement that led to the creation of civil rights laws of the 1960s. Thus, historically, the entire American system has treated African American like subordinates to other races, especially the whites. Even after the creation of the civil rights laws in the 1960s and the election of a black president in 2008, the country is still facing the same problem of racism as it was before and after the civil war, during slavery

The book was written by Michelle Alexander, who is a civil rights litigator as well as a legal scholar and the book talks about discrimination against other minorities. The principal premise of the book is that the current mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow. The author tries to show that the perception among Americans that discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s is wrong. She points to the criminal justice system as the new Jim Crow, using the War on Drugs as the primary tool to enforce old and new forms of repression and discrimination. The new kind of racism has led the country to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world and most of those imprisoned are Black Americans. The writer projects that one-third of African-American population will be in prisons if the current trends continue. Alexander’s view that the current criminal justice system is discriminatory can be confirmed by the fact that whites are more likely to commit drug-related offenses than people of

The social control results in what the author calls a "racial caste system," where African-Americans are put in an inferior position (Alexander, 2010). She holds that the system emerged as a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement. The author’s argument makes a lot of sense considering that the legal system has failed to deal with drug trafficking in the country. Most of the people jailed are small drug peddlers and users while powerful drug dealers continue with their business. If the War on Drugs were genuine, powerful drug traffickers would be in prisons. Additionally, the ratio of prisoners in the collection facilities should be almost the same as the national demographic composition. Having more blacks than whites in prisons casts doubts on the justice system of the country. Even if it was true that the African-Americans involved themselves more in criminal activities than the whites, there must have been a reason for this, and the explanation should not be far from racial