The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration

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Racism in the United States has not remained the same over time since its creation. Racism has shifted, changed, and shaped into unrecognizable ways that fit into the fabric of the American society to render it nearly invisible to the majority of Americans. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shatters this dominantly held belief. The New Jim Crow makes a reader extremely question the high rates of incarceration in the United States is an attempt to maintain blacks as an underclass. Michelle Alexander asserts that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” (Alexander 2). The result is Black and Latino men who face hurdles and denial of civil liberties …show more content…
Alexander makes the particularly astute point that the perpetuation of the racial hierarchy exists in large part because of the fears and vulnerability of low income working class white Americans. Specifically, noteworthy is her analysis of the way in which politicians manipulated the anxieties of working class whites who were pitted against working class blacks. For fear of ending up at the bottom of the social ladder working class whites sacrificed racial solidarity for a position just above blacks on this hierarchy. Alexander quotes of one of President Richard Nixon’s key advisers on his strategy, “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (Alexander 44). Alexander associates this use of racial separation to the eventual correlation of blacks with crime. As Alexander provides, “Conservatives argued that poverty was caused not by structural factors related to race and class but rather by culture – particularly black culture.” (Alexander 45). The Republican campaigns in the 60’s and 70’s were imbued with a sentiment that appealed to anti-black voters by appealing to their belief that blacks were the root of public problems of poverty, crime, and other social problems. Alexander quotes a disturbing blunt statement credited to …show more content…
The author makes her point that a major social movement is needed to put in place, a new consensus to not only overturn the basic structure of the caste system but to make sure that no new mechanism of control rises up as a replacement. “Build a new, egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a compassionate rather than the punitive impulse toward poor people of color…” and move towards an appreciation of “the distance between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American society.” (Alexander 235). Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow obliges its readers to face the devastating effects that mass incarceration and the colorblind laws that have supported it, has had on African Americans. Once that door is opened and the consequences of the system exposed, comparing mass incarceration to Jim Crow should be accepted by readers as a powerful, needed push to motivate action. And The New Jim Crow does just
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