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The New Jim Crow Theme

448 Words2 Pages

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. The second theme is Denial and Ignorance of the American people. The only way we can shed light on this issue is to educate the people into thinking differently about civil rights. Media plays a huge role in …show more content…

This sparked a height in incarceration rates, especially those of black men. Through the system, Alexander believes we have pushed people into second class status, and therefore our criminal justice system remains unfair. The fifth theme is due to the lying, manipulation, subterfuge, and obfuscation of the American people. Alexander (2012), believes that from day one we have been lied to by our government. The war on drugs pushed people into fear, and therefore manipulated law enforcement to go after people of color. Again, our media has promoted incorrect stereotypes, and the politicians lied to us through it all. All of this is the reason that The New Jim Crow exists. The last theme of The New Jim Crow is history. History is seeming to repeat itself, and Alexander (2012) explains in her book that what is going on today, is exactly what happened during the Jim Crow age. To break this pattern, we must ask the questions that no one wants to. We need stop this vicious cycle of mass incarceration before it leads into something much

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1288 Words | 6 Pages

Synopsis In the introduction, Michelle Alexander (2010) introduces herself and expresses her passion about the topic of how the criminal justice system accomplishes racial hierarchy here in the United States. In chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) suggests that the federal government can no longer be trusted to make any effort to enforce black civil rights legislation, especially when the Drug War is aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In response to revolts formed between black slaves and white indentured servants, rich whites extended special privileges to their indentured servants that drove a wedge between them and the slaves that successfully stopped the revolts.

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According to Alexander, “Today, most American know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration” (p. 182). Before reading this book I did know of the inequality towards people of color in the criminal justice. book has made me realized how easily we as humans, jump into conclusion without thinking twice and judging a person by their look or race without trying to get who they are. Although most people know better and know how wrong it is to judge a book or person on their cover we often find ourselves doing just that when we first come into contact with a different culture. This book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander has made me realized how the United State has one of the largest population in prison.

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492 Words | 2 Pages

Another claim is that African Americans are overrepresented as criminals in the news. Therefore, the news expresses “fear” to the white community toward black communities.

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983 Words | 4 Pages

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Michelle Alexander in her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" argues that law enforcement officials routinely racially profile minorities to deny them socially, politically, and economically as was accustomed in the Jim Crow era.

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1343 Words | 6 Pages

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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In The Meaning of Freedom, activist Angela Davis critiques the plausibility of democracy and collective freedom in the United States. By examining parallels between slavery and the carceral state, Davis contends that the two systems mutually characterize black people as disposable and compels them to incapacitation. Focusing on the two oppressive systems’ reliance on the maintenance of ignorance, Davis discusses how this ignorance is connected to America’s dominant sentiments of capitalism and self-interest, which, altogether, perpetuate cycles of abuse that disproportionately harm communities of color and lower-class peoples. As a result, this propels the creation of social hierarchies which, because it inherently cultivates inequalities, causes America’s classification as a “democracy” to be impossible.

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Is it fair that an African American man is sentenced up to life in prison for possession of drugs when Brock Turner is sentenced to only 14 years, later to be reduced to six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious women. The judiciary system are believed to have a high african american incarceration rate as a result of discrimination. At a presidential debate on Martin Luther King Day, President Barack Obama said that “Blacks and whites are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, and receive very different sentences… for the same crime.” Hillary Clinton said the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more african americans proportionately than whites.”

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983 Words | 4 Pages

In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

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1381 Words | 6 Pages

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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1721 Words | 7 Pages

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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1144 Words | 5 Pages

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with about 2.3 million people in prison. According to Vitanna.org’s statistics, an estimated one million of these prisoners are African American. 12.3 percent of the population is black, yet over 43 percent of America’s prisoners are black. This disparity is certainly unnatural, seeing as how African Americans are no more likely to be criminals than whites. Black men are overrepresented in prisons because of the unfortunately common stereotype that they are all remorseless criminals.

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1728 Words | 7 Pages

The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for several reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. This literature review will discuss the ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system and how mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism has become a problem.

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562 Words | 3 Pages

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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977 Words | 4 Pages

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