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Summer 2010 |
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Book Review: The new Jim Crow |
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According to Alexander the war on drugs has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. Once branded a felon, they are put into a second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those branded felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents during the Jim Crow era.
Professor Alexander reports that more African Americans are under control today in prisons or jails, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began! Contrary to popular belief, the war on drugs was not declared in response to rising |
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. She is a former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
In this book Alexander explores how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American under caste. She argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
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drug crime. President Ronald Reagan declared the war in 1982 at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. It was launched in response to racial politics as a part of the Republican Party’s Southern strategy. This was an effort to appeal to poor and working class white voters who felt vulnerable and threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. The “get tough on crime” rhetoric made it possible to recruit new Republican voters through racially coded appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
Alexander says that Democrats have been equally responsible as they started to |
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compete for who could create the stiffest get tough on crime laws. President Bill Clinton did more than Reagan in this regard. His administration was responsible for many of the laws that banned ex-convicts from public housing for 5 years and banned them from food stamps for the rest of their lives. She says African Americans have been complicit in their silence and shame.
This book also looks at the role the Supreme Court played in immunizing prosecutors and the entire criminal justice system from claims of racial bias and establishing that racial bias in sentencing cannot be challenged under the 14th Amendment.
Alexander feels that the clock has quietly been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. The culture has focused on the election of President Obama and superstars like Oprah. But the reality on the ground of disparities reported in a recent study published by the Post-Gazette on March 9, 2010, that the average net worth of single black women is $5, this study tells a very different and painful story.
I am reminded of the old saying that you can’t cook a frog by dropping it into boiling water, but it will jump right out. Conversely, if you gradually turn up the heat you can achieve the same goal. I find Michelle Alexander’s book to be one of the best I’ve encountered that connects the dots to show how systems can evolve to be dramatically harmful to the good people who work in them and are supposed to be served by them.
After reading The New Jim Crow I feel compelled to examine again what the concept of “justice” should be. This is one of the most eye opening books I have read in a decade. We still have plenty of work to do.
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