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The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander Summary

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Recommended: History of racism

Michelle Alexander is a writer and an advocate for civil rights. In her book she writes about the advantages of the civil rights movement, which has been the foundation by the mass imprisonment of African Americans during the war on drugs. She talks about the history of how race evolved from slavery to the civil war and from civil war to the civil rights movement. This definitely attracted unwanted attention from conservative politicians. Mass imprisonment was the portal to Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow”. This was her concept to understand the real reason why the black people were denied citizenship. This also denied them from any basic rights any citizen ought to have which turned down all their potential opportunities in the community. It seems to me that Michelle does not try to solve the problem however lays outs the potential issues to be changed. Issues such as public awareness, law enforcement and the way the prison functions. She also mentioned these changed will be incredibly hard to change but the changes must be made.
Michelle mentions, “ I was rushing to catch the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed in large bold print: THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW.” (Alexander, 2010, …show more content…

This is shown when she says, “…racial caste system do no require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr warned more than forty-five years ago.” (Alexander, 2010, p.14) As mentioned earlier, the one of the central themes of the book is racial aggression even though the “overt racial hostility” does not really exist in the Jim Crow era. People very easily believe in conventional information rather find out if the information is legitimate or not. People usually think people go to jail because they have genuinely done something wrong and are pleased with such little information they have about a

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a book outlining and analysing the social constructs of the United States of America through the context of mechanics of the judicial system. It compares and contrasts the slavery, old Jim Crow law and post Jim Crow law eras in the means to highlight the racial discrimination against the Black and Brown community by the White elite. The author explores the court cases and legislation passed by the government to implement a national system geared to favor the White community and its effects on the imagery that has developed in the American mind set. Michelle Alexander is among many things an African-American woman. She is lawyer who represented in the Civil Rights era.

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Jim Crow was not a person, it was a series of laws that imposed legal segregation between white Americans and African Americans in the American South. It promoting the status “Separate but Equal”, but for the African American community that was not the case. African Americans were continuously ridiculed, and were treated as inferiors. Although slavery was abolished in 1865, the legal segregation of white Americans and African Americans was still a continuing controversial subject and was extended for almost a hundred years (abolished in 1964). Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South is a series of primary accounts of real people who experienced this era first-hand and was edited by William H.Chafe, Raymond

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In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander explores complex themes of oppression, discrimination, and how the United States criminal justice system has been disproportionately affecting Black communities for decades. Alexander outlines and analyzes the rise and fall of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and mass incarceration, as well as the War on Drugs and how the prison system continues to put Black men in bondage. Alongside this, she explores the limitations that incarceration places on Black men, the impact this has on their lives, and how society can work to combat the system. The novel is particularly relevant to the field of community psychology, as it highlights several ways that incarceration has affected the well-being and communities of those in bondage.

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I attended a high school that is predominately of color, however, I don't remember a time when a teacher taught the students about systemic racism. So, I decided to take the matter into my own hands – I pressured my history teacher to talk about the issues that currently affect people of color. I recommended a book called "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander to be taught the last few weeks of school. Surprisingly, the teacher agreed to add the book to the curriculum. We talked about systemic racism, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the prison industrial complex.

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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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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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Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination

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Alexander uses the statistics of how a black man is more likely to face punishment from law enforcement. By using proven facts Alexander better informs the readers how the racial caste system works in law enforcement. Ultimately, Michelle Alexander persuades the audience with stories of the injustice African Americans face because of the wrongful use of incarceration in the United States of America. She also uses the statistics for her readers to have a full understanding that she is Ray 2 finding the evidence to support her claims that America has the highest incarceration rate in

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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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Upon reading this book, I have not heard Michelle Alexander. My expectation for the book was not high. When a person hasn’t heard of a previous author, there an expectation is really not that good. However, that has changed when I stared to read it. My thoughts on reading the book it portrayed African Americans as not having a voice in society.

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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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is a means of victimizing a specific people or if it is directed towards a certain race. This is because the distributive principles may provide guidance for choices faced by each society every now and then. One may start by considering the principle of strict egalitarianism that states that people are morally equal and that it is best to give effect to this idea. We get the information that in dispensing criminal justice, one community or race should not get overlooked but all should be treated fairly. In the book by alexander Michael that goes by the title "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" she tends to believe

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Slavery is over therefore how can racism still exist? This has been a question posed countlessly in discussions about race. What has proven most difficult is adequately demonstrating how racism continues to thrive and how forms of oppression have manifested. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues that slavery has not vanished; it instead has taken new forms that allowed it to flourish in modern society. These forms include mass incarceration and perpetuation of racist policies and societal attitudes that are disguised as color-blindness that ultimately allow the system of oppression to continue.

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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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I think she was even trying to imply that the issue reached much farther than anyone could have possibly grasped. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther Ling Jr. said it best by saying “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere”. The fact of it is, we as a country went through incredibly difficult times, as far as human equality and civil rights are concerned. One may think: what wicked thoughts would one have to think in order to hate others based on nothing more than the color of their skin? The sad truth is, that question can’t be answered easily.

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