Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is a jarring, intricate look into one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time: mass incarceration. A former American Civil Liberties Union attorney and current professor of law at Ohio State University, Alexander takes on the role of scholar-insurgent in The New Jim Crow and argues for nothing less than a full interrogation of what she sees as the most "damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement" (11). This "backlash," according to Alexander--generally understood in civil rights history common sense as the rise of a New Right--is much more insidious, racist, and systematic than previously thought. Mass incarceration, she argues, is a "tightly networked system of laws, policies, [and] institutions" that looks eerily similar to life under Jim Crow and even slavery (13). Those caught in the crosshairs of this system of (racial) social control suffer life-long, legal discrimination in housing, welfare, suffrage, employment, and health care--all of which lead to a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (181).
Such marginality has several causes, yet she sees colorblind racial indifference and the War on Drugs as the two biggest culprits in the creation of yet another permanent racial under-caste. To make her case, Alexander pounds readers with facts, statistics, and Supreme Court rulings--the fact that "as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records" as one of many gut-checks (7). In short, Alexander's The New Jim Crow lays bare the troubling, racist realities of the American criminal justice system. And yet, maybe due to the severity of her topic, Alexander makes occasional leaps in logic, oversimplifies at times, and even lets the pathos of the subject matter cloud her conclusions. Nevertheless, her arguments are mostly sound and ultimately make the case for a desperately needed shift in public discourse and civil rights advocacy to address the "human rights nightmare" that is mass incarceration (15).
One of the most convincing parts of The New Jim Crow is the chapter entitled "The Lockdown." With powerful detail, Alexander takes readers step-by-step along the criminal justice chain to expose how the racist War on Drugs is waged. What she calls the "Rules of the Game," Alexander convincingly argues that the War on Drugs depends upon the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights--rights that protect privacy of person and property. Alexander threads the Supreme Court decisions of California v. Acevedo, Terry v. Ohio, and Florida v. Bostick to show that police tactics such as stop-and-frisk are protected by Supreme Court rulings. This point is not to be taken lightly, for it leads readers to understand that the state is absolutely complicit in both freeing police to round up whomever they want as well as tie the hands of citizens seeking legal recourse against discriminatory policing. This dynamic of racist state-based control, Alexander reveals, gets worse and worse as those arrested are hamstrung by unchecked prosecutorial powers, grossly inadequate public representation, mandatory minimum sentences, and perpetual "correctional supervision" if labeled felons (92). Readers are left wondering how such injustice can go on in a supposedly democratic society. Alexander is at her best here, implicating the entire institution of American justice in fewer than 50 pages.
Alexander's arguments in parts of other chapters, however, lack precision and evidence. In Chapter 4, Alexander writes: "If we actually learned to show love...and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement--rather than go colorblind--mass incarceration would not exist today" (172). Although a belief in cross-racial "love" and solidarity seems like it would remedy racial inequalities and, in a clear reach, mass incarceration, Alexander's argument is regrettably naïve here. For one, as she demonstrates pages earlier in the same chapter, civil rights leaders and everyday folk acknowledging race or "blackness" is not something that can be easily remedied with simple effort or even love. Rather, unconscious and conscious racism is difficult to out and defeat--with the 1995 study in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education in Chapter 3 as one of her many examples (107). While it is helpful to recognize that racism works at the unconscious level, it's unfair to argue that such "pre-thought" racism will go away with simple love and concern. Mass incarceration, without question, is part and parcel of a larger history of black criminalization and the racist political economy that is the US criminal justice system. In the above quote, it seems like Alexander is lost in the pathos of her subject and ignores her very own arguments from pages earlier.
What is also problematic is Alexander's assumption that love "across racial lines" was absent during the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the fact that she provides no evidence, one can simply study the history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina or Milwaukee and discover that cross-racial concern was absolutely occurring during the civil rights movement. Now how we define "love" and "concern" may be up for debate, but to categorically frame the civil rights movement--and all conscious sympathizers--as lacking in concern and love just doesn't hold water. It would have been much more productive for Alexander to take the civil rights movement as well as racial justice champions to task with convincing evidence. She does this to some degree in her later chapters, but her "no concern" claim unfairly lays mass incarceration at the feet of civil rights thinkers.
If Alexander's purpose is to "stimulate a conversation" and get people thinking and talking about mass incarceration, she has accomplished her goal (15). Over the past two years, in fact, Alexander has appeared on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, and C-SPAN, as well as been invited to give talks in churches, universities, bookstores, and other spaces around the country. In light of her critical embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the apparent rise of her The New Jim Crow as perhaps a galvanizing force for justice, the popularity of her book begs a few questions: Is The New Jim Crow and similar works that centralize injustice the new frontier for a contemporary Civil Rights Movement? And is The New Jim Crow evidence enough that the Civil Rights Movement has never ended, but only recast in the realm of ideas? Alexander, of course, would argue that a movement must be more than ideas; it must also be built on love, human and racial recognition, and the full embrace of difference. For Alexander, nothing less will do. However, as she argues in her "Introduction," racialized systems of control are "inevitable"--almost as if mass incarceration is destined to be reborn (15). Though Alexander gives ways to prevent this rebirth, such teleology, though present throughout her book, is never reconciled. In the end, we are left with a conflicted, uneasy sense of hope as the racial control telos haunts readers even after the book has been shelved.
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Alexander, a civil rights lawyer, spotlights the institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system.
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The New Face of American Racism
Jim Crow is an ugly blemish on the American nation and while much of the repressive practices of Jim Crow have been eliminated or at least sharply curtailed, there are still active, often covert and/or conniving ways to keep minority races in their place. These underhanded means of social control and oppression are the subject of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.So, what exactly is the new Jim Crow? It is a means to control, dehumanize, repress, and ultimately destroy the lives of minorities by finding ways to target them for breaking crimes and send them off to prison. The main weapon of control is the disastrous and immoral war on drugs and this book devotes most of its pages to examining this so- called war, showing how it was devised and implemented as a way to unfairly target blacks and other minorities.This book is well- articulated and researched and some of its statistics are shocking. As I read, I often thought that the some of the stats had to be typos- they were too extreme to be true. But a quick check of sources proves them accurate. The chances of getting arrested, going to prison, and spending the rest of your life labeled as a felon are multiple times higher if your skin happens to be dark. Even if exactly the same crime is committed, a white person has exponentially greater odds of getting off easy, sometimes even having all charges dropped or the crime reduced. The disparities among different groups of people prove that the war on drugs has nothing to do with gaining control of a substance and everything to do with targeting specific groups of people.I can remember back in the 1980’s when the war on drugs was picking up steam. I was a university student at the time and we used to debate the drug war and its true motives. We all agreed that the war had nothing to do with the actual drugs- no one, not even a politician, could be so stupid to think that a war could be won against a substance. We knew there was something else going on and now that decades of data are available, the true motives have been exposed. This book does an excellent job explaining how/why the war on drugs was invented and how its proponents have been generally successful at pulling it off and making it seem like a fair, ‘colorblind’ way to deal with criminal activity.America’s racist past isn’t really in the past, as much as we want to believe. We like to think that progress has been made and, in many ways, it has, but we are far away from a truly equal and fair society. The New Jim Crow is an excellent way to learn about the new tactics embraced by the racist crowd and a call to action for everyone who wants to work toward a fair and just society.
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Reviewed in Australia on November 5, 2020