The New Jim Crow

"This examination of racial inequality in the justice system aligns with Mark Zuckerberg's stated interest in exploring different cultures, beliefs, and histories. It's an expected read for someone exploring social justice issues."

"That’s on my list because it’s very important for America. One of the ways that America differs from Western Europe is that we have the legacy of slavery in our history. It turns out that racism —or race-craft as some people like to call it, to deny that there is even something in race, that it’s all just mystical thinking—is very, very sharp in the United States. It’s also being promoted politically, which is adding another complication. “The rich might accept a rather small tax on their income or wealth in return for helping out the poorer members of society” The new Jim Crow that Michelle Alexander is talking about is mass incarceration. This comes from the drug wars supported by presidents Nixon and Reagan, which singled out African Americans. There were very severe penalties for drugs that were used by black people—and much lighter sentences for the same kinds of drugs, in different forms, that were used by white people. Blacks are only about 15% of the population but they are about 40% of the prisoners in penitentiaries now. They are heavily overrepresented, about three times as much. The argument in this book is that this is like the Jim Crow policies—after the failure at the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War —which kept blacks down in a second-class situation in a permanent way. It’s a kind of polemic. It’s written very vividly and it’s quite a good book, yes. One out of three black men can expect to go to jail now. That’s a very startling figure in the United States. It destroys communities and makes education of children, particularly black children in inner cities, very difficult. We need more resources going into urban education but, instead, we have fewer resources going into urban schools than we have going into the suburban schools. This is a long story that comes about because the blacks were predominantly in the south. Then, as I explain in my book, there is the great migration that came up to the north. When blacks from the south came into the north and moved into cities to find industrial jobs, the whites moved out into the suburbs. “These books all fit together into a picture of rather sad race relations in the United States. Sad and very durable” Then, you have various Supreme Court decisions. A famous one was the 1974 Milliken decision about Detroit. People sued and said the difference in funding between the urban, poor school districts and the suburban—now white—school districts around there, was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled no, that it would be unconstitutional if the intent of drawing school boundaries was racist, but if a school boundary became racist by the moving of population rather than by the formulation of the law, then it was not unconstitutional. So that’s a court decision that condemned black, urban school districts to poverty and the suburban schools to have more prosperity. Now, there are some states where the state courts have ruled that poor funding for urban schools is unconstitutional. And so, there has been, in a few cases, some amelioration of this federal rule. But the federal rule is still the stronger one in the country as a whole."

"Michelle Alexander begins by reminding us that there used to be laws and statutes that said if you were African American you had a different set of voting rights than other Americans, a different set of unemployment rights than other Americans, and differentiated citizenship rights in many other areas. Many of the basic freedoms we now take for granted were explicitly circumscribed by law. Today, according to Alexander, although we have a purportedly colourblind society, the same thing is happening. But today it is done by imposing differentiated citizenship rights on convicted felons. Because of the war on drugs, according to Alexander, a disproportionate number of convicted felons are black. For example, in many states felons are stripped of the right to vote. So, in her view, we have a system that resembles and is related to the old Jim Crow system of law, but we can’t see this because the “New Jim Crow” doesn’t base its prohibitions explicitly on race. Under American law, only discriminations based on protected categories are prohibited. Those categories are: Race, gender, religion, disability, nationality, and to a much lesser extent sexual orientation. If I want to discriminate against people wearing red shirts, for the most part that discrimination will receive very little scrutiny under American law. Alexander points out that because felons don’t fall into any of the statutory categories that prohibit discrimination, it is perfectly permissible and quite common to discriminate against people who have been to prison. She wants us to see that the people who are in the category of felon, particularly drug offenders, are disproportionately of one race – African American. She reminds us that if we explicitly prohibited a large number of black Americans from voting, or explicitly exempted a large number of African Americans from anti-discrimination laws, we would all see those actions as immoral and illegal. She shows us that American society is doing something indirectly that would be unconstitutional if done directly. Alexander says very explicitly in the introduction of her book that the system of Jim Crow has simply reasserted itself in different form. She doesn’t say why. I’d be surprised if she believes that there is a conspiracy to do this. I interpret Alexander as saying that there is a marked indifference to the basic citizenship rights of African Americans. That indifference allows our society to accept laws that would not be accepted if the people who were being disproportionately disfranchised were white. That is how I would characterise what she’s saying. Her book is also a strongly argued example of scholarship that views the American citizenship tradition as inegalitarian at its core. The New Black is a series of forward-looking essays by legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, historians, all of whom are trying to forecast and think through newly-emerging questions in race relations. In the 21st century, how should we think through race and politics? How should we think about the Voting Rights Act, and its continued role in American politics? How, if at all, should we modify civil rights laws? How should we write history differently? How should we rethink accepted debates, analyses and categories in light of the fact that we live in a very different era of race relations than existed in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when much our current thinking on this subject was formed? Discrimination against people who have been part of the penal system is a problem with incredibly widespread repercussions, whether or not one agrees with Alexander’s argument in The New Jim Cro w. Its importance probably dwarfs those of all the other civil rights issues of today. We need to find alternatives to incarcerating a large class of our citizens and giving them little opportunity to become responsible members of society, even upon release. We want those who have been in the penal system to have the chance to reestablish their basic citizenship rights. It’s an incredibly complicated problem of law, morality, and public policy of course. There are no easy answers. But if I were a civil rights lawyer looking to attack systematic inequality in the 21st century, this is an issue that would be at the top of my list. This interview was published on April 23rd, 2012"

"Michelle Alexander shows how you can change a system politically and legally, but without ever destroying its social roots. Racial domination in the United States has always found a way of coming back to life, despite legal changes. From slavery to Jim Crow, from Jim Crow to civil rights, the caste system of racial domination has almost stayed the same, though using different instruments. Since 1964, segregation has become illegal, yet the caste system hasn’t disappeared. It has been re-created through the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Alexander shows that discrimination isn’t illegal in the United States, because in many ways it is possible to discriminate against criminals. All the system had to do was find a way to label Blacks as criminals, to be able to cast them aside again. It is probably the most important book on prisons since Foucault ’s Discipline and Punish in 1975. It proves that you can win the judicial battle, change the legal order and still lose the political one. Racial and social discrimination is, in a way, autonomous from the law and can perpetuate itself despite equal rights. It is essentially the same idea that Pierre Bourdieu developed in Masculine Domination , when he wrote that feminism had won many battles for women, but that the structure of male domination had survived. And the #MeToo movement has shown just how much this domination still exists today in the form of sexual violence. For these reasons, we have to completely reinvent what it means to change social structures. How should you fight when you have apparently won the political battle? What remains to be changed once everyone has the same rights? How to change social structures and not only legal structures? If we go back to Michelle Alexander’s book, if we abolished prisons, the caste system would find a way to use different instruments and morph into something else. And this applies to almost all issues that the left cares about. Politicians on the left tend to think that making issues visible is what’s important, so they can be discussed and new laws can be voted. But what we need is a way to change objective structures, and laws are never enough to do that. “What we need is a way to change objective structures, and laws are never enough to do that.” The real question is: how do we change the culture and mental attitudes that are at the root of the problem? In the last 50 years, the only movement that may have reached this goal is the LGBT movement. It has managed to change both the legal structures—by obtaining equal rights in many countries—and the mental structures by reversing public opinion. Of course, homophobia remains a worrying issue in many places, but it is remarkable how far the gay movement has come. Legal changes are very important, because when we’re talking about sending fewer people to prison, the law remains the most direct instrument to achieve this. But the discrimination system could easily survive such reform, by quickly moving to a different realm. As Marx theorised, a legal structure that is supposed to be neutral, universal and abstract, once applied to a world of inequalities, always becomes an unequal structure that reinforces social gaps. The staggering differences between sentences in white-collar and blue-collar trials is a well-documented proof of this. It doesn’t mean, though, that we should send all white-collar convicts to prison as we do for blue collars. Revenge should never be the goal. If we want to challenge the criminal justice system, we should re-evaluate the repressive impulses on which we are too often relying. Some political or social movements think of themselves as emancipating, but still base their rhetoric on punishment and incarceration in order to solve social issues. Certain branches of feminism sadly are a good example of this."

"I was enraged when I read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, but with a productive fury. The book is a fierce dissection of the American justice system."

"I opened it feeling like I knew a lot about mass incarceration, but she presents her case with such an unrelenting avalanche of evidence and data that I found myself even angrier at the depth and breadth of the problem. It is the one book I have given to my whole staff."

"I really wish Michelle Alexander, who wrote “The New Jim Crow,” about African-American men in prisons, would write a sequel, focusing on the plight of women."

"This is the first book since Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" to broaden my knowledge on racism in America."

"The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, and Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, for overwhelming evidence of caste in our criminal justice system."

"I also recently read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and can't quit promoting it."

"Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow"