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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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