Michelle Alexander is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary. She wrote in the Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition of this book, “[In 2008] I wanted Barack Obama to win. And I feared it. I worried that, if a black man were elected president … our nation would sink further into denial, and no one would listen to the message that I felt desperate to convey: we are not free of our racial history. To the contrary, a new caste system has been born again in America, a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world has ever seen… I was right to worry.” (Pg. x)
She continues, “I did not, and could not, know when writing this book that our nation would soon awaken violently from its brief colorblind slumber… We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re … recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people---calling Mexican migrants ‘murderers,’ ‘rapists,’ and ‘bad people,’ referring to developing African nations as ‘s-ithole countries,’ and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a ‘disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.’ Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet… we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists… as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America.” (Pg. xiii)
She goes on, “It is tempting… to write an updated version of ‘[this book] that would account for all that has occurred. The new, revised version would describe how and why our nation has swung dramatically from … a ‘race to incarcerate’… to a bipartisan commitment to downsizing our prison system during the same period of time that a liberal, black president drastically expanded the system of mass deportation and mass surveillance.” (Pg. xvi) “The new, expanded version of this book would describe the relationship between the politics of mass incarceration… and the role of prison profiteering in the expansion of these systems… But telling the story of everything that has changed and remained the same would require a new book entirely.” (Pg. xviii)
She explains, “I’m frequently asked… what about violent crime?... I chose to focus my attention on the exponential increase in arrests, prosecutions and sentences for nonviolent crime and drug offenses…. I thought that the time was overdue for public attention to be focused on state violence, rather than violence committed by individuals in impoverished, segregated communities suffering from economic collapse.” (Pg. xxii)
Later, she summarizes, “A new social consensus must be forged about race about the role of race in defining the basic structure of our society if we ever hope to abolish the New Jim Crow. This new consensus must begin with dialogue, a conversation that fosters a critical consciousness, a key prerequisite to effective social action. This book is an attempt to ensure that the conversation does not end with nervous laughter.” (Pg. 19)
In the Introduction, she outlines, “I had come to suspect that… the criminal justice system … was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely… I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” (Pg. 4-5)
She notes, “The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among inner-city residents created economic desperation, leading some to sell drugs---most notably crack cocaine… Joblessness and crack swept inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs. No one should ever attempt to minimize the harm caused crack cocaine and the related violence… Numerous paths were available to our nation in the wake of the crack crisis, yet for reasons traceable largely to racial politics and fearmongering, we chose war. Conservatives found they could finally justify an all-out war on an ‘enemy’ that had been racially defined years before.” (Pg. 65)
She observes, “the people who wind up in front of a judge are usually guilty of some crime. The parade of guilty people through America’s courtrooms gives the false impression to the public---as well as to judges---that when the police have a ‘hunch,’ it makes sense to act on it… The truth, however, is that most people stopped and searched in the War on Drugs are perfectly innocent of any crime… The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) trains police to conduct utterly unreasonable and discriminatory stops and searches throughout the United States.” (Pg. 88-89)
She states, “Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped … in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws… that has been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime.” (Pg. 117)
She points out, “Any notion that drug use among blacks is more… dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African-American counterparts. The notion that whites comprise the vast majority of drug users and dealers… may seem implausible to some… however, the prevalence of white drug crime---including drug dealing---should not be surprising. After all, where do whites get their illegal drugs? Do they all drive to the ghetto to purchase them from somebody standing on a street corner?... Whites tend to sell to whites, blacks to blacks… The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is pure fiction.” (Pg. 124)
She suggests, “From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have … raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that … a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer… Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations… All of this could have happened … in white communities, but it did not. Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ‘hood.” (Pg. 155)
She says, “What about gangsta rap and the culture of violence that has been embraced by so many black youth? Is there not some truth to the notion that black culture has devolved in recent years, as reflected in youth standing on the street corners … and rappers boasting about beating their ‘hos’ and going to jail? Is there not some reason to wonder whether the black community, to some extent, has lost its moral compass? The easy answer is to say yet and wag a finger at those who are behaving badly… The more difficult answer… is to say yes… we should be concerned about the behavior of men trapped in ghettoized communities, but the deep failure of morality is our own… it is helpful to step back and put the behavior of young black men who appear to embrace ‘gangsta culture’ in the proper perspective. There is absolutely nothing abnormal or surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma… Psychologists had long observed… a powerful coping strategy… is embracing one’s stigmatized identity.” (Pg. 212-213)
She asserts, “The fact that Barack Obama can give a speech … [on] the subject of fathers who are ‘AWOL’ without every acknowledging that the majority of black men in many large urban areas are currently under the control of the criminal justice system… They did not walk out on their families voluntarily; they were taken away in handcuffs, often due to a massive federal program known as the War on Drugs.” (Pg. 223)
She observes, “sanctions imposed by operation of law… often have a greater impact on one’s life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars… the vast majority of people convicted of crimes will never integrate into mainstream white society. They will be… denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then released again, caught in a close circuit.” (Pg. 231)
She acknowledges, “It is frequently argued in defense of mass incarceration that African Americans want more police and more prisons because crime is so bad in some ghetto communities… The argument… seems relatively straightforward, but… [has some aspects] which are quite problematic. To begin with, the argument implies that most African Americans prefer harsh criminal justice policies to other forms of governmental intervention, such as job creation, economic development… educational reform… as long-term solutions to problems associated with crime… The one thing that is clear from the survey data … is that African Americans in ghetto communities experience an intense ‘dual frustration’ regarding crime and law enforcement.’ (Pg. 258-259)
Back in the New Deal era, “Although many poor African Americans rejected the … strategies of the black elite, ultimately moral uplift ideology became the new common sense… Black elites found they had much to gain by positioning themselves as ‘race managers,’ and many poor African Americans became persuaded that perhaps their degraded status was, after all, their own fault. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that today some black mayors… as well as preachers, teachers… and ordinary folk---endorse ‘get tough’ tactics and spend more time chastising the urban poor for their behavior than seeking meaningful policy solutions to the appalling conditions in which they are forced to live and raise their children.” (Pg. 266)
She laments, “The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on Poverty would have bene launched… compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead, our nation declared a War on Drugs.” (Pg. 271) She proposes, “There is no path to liberation for communities of color that includes this ongoing war.” (Pg. 288)
She concludes, “another generation of advocates… who know best the brutality of the new caste system.. should [be] … emboldened… by the fierce urgency of now. Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised… that when those who have been locked up … finally have the chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage…. We may be tempted to control it, or doubt it… But we should do no such thing… we should do nothing more than look him in the eyes and tell him the truth.” (Pg. 324)
Both thought-provoking and controversial, this book will be “must reading” for anyone concerning about current issues such as drugs, crime, etc.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Every system of injustice depends on the silence, paralysis, confusion, and cooperation of those it seeks to eliminate or control.Highlighted by 4,853 Kindle readers- The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.Highlighted by 4,374 Kindle readers
- Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.Highlighted by 3,843 Kindle readers
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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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The Reality Behind The War on Drugs
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