The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Paperback – January 16, 2012

If you really want to know the extent of white privilege and how it survives given that most Americans are not outwardly racist anymore, this is the book for you. As Michelle Alexander points out in great detail, white privilege exists today in America in the form of mass incarceration, the generic term for the fact that despite being a supposedly "free" country, we manage to imprison more of our citizens than any other country on earth, even Russia or China. But more than that, a very high percentage of these people are black, and in fact they go to prison at a rate disproportionate to the frequency with which they commit crimes. To be blunt, if you are caught selling illegal drugs in most states, you are likely to go to prison if you are black, but you will more likely get treated more leniently if you are white. It's worse than that, because, unlike most other developed nations, we make certain that once someone is convicted of a felony, he loses the vote, his right to public housing, the ability to get a job, in other words, he can be discriminated against for life. But he committed the crime so he deserves it, right? Not so fast - whereas whites commit many crimes at the same rate as blacks or even higher, especially drug crimes, they go to prison much less often. Blacks have to be perfect - dot their i's and cross all their t's. It's not realistic, and it's unfair.

Alexander points out that this is nothing more than a new system to marginalize and discriminate against blacks, and calls it "the new Jim Crow". If anything, it's more accurate to call it the new slavery. Just go to Angola State Prison in Louisiana and watch all the black prisoners working in the cotton fields. Look familiar? Now how did this happen? How did the number of Americans behind bars go from 350,000 (still a high number) to over 2 million in the last 30-40 years? A large part of it was the War on Drugs, started by Nixon around 1970. Alexander traces the history of the drug war, and describes how it became a vehicle for mistreating blacks even in the face of prevalent "colorblind" attitudes of most Americans today. We don't directly label blacks as inferior and make them ride the back of the bus today, we just try real hard to get them labeled as felons, then we can discriminate. And most Americans don't realize we're doing it and how much damage this causes. It's also expensive and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In the final chapters Alexander offers some ideas on how to dismantle this system. It's very hard, and it's not enough to file lawsuits in individual cases. It requires a major protest movement. Many things have to be undone, such as the entire drug war, disenfranchisement laws, the management of prisons by private corporations to name a few. But the resistance will be huge because many jobs would disappear, and no one wants to be seen making life better for criminals. Also, colorblindness won't do - we need to be conscious of racial differences yet driven to treat everyone with respect, fairness and kindness. It's a totally different mindset for most Americans. Especially fascinating was her description of how such concessions, or "racial bribes", as affirmative action serve to justify continuing the system as it is. Affirmative action has helped a lot of blacks become successful, but it glosses over the main problem. The fact that we have a black President also obscures the real issues.

Alexander states also that a full treatment of how to fix this problem would require another book, and I eagerly await that. In the meantime, please read this one.

This entire book is a MUST read, especially for every US citizen! It takes you from the very beginnings of the War on Drugs, through how the laws are unequally applied (both by law enforcement & the legal system) to the mass incarceration we have today. It then goes on to explain how this new labeling system is then used to discriminate against a large portion of the population, from housing to voting. It's a fascinating & disheartening book that I'll be recommending to everyone for a long time.

It also explains a great many of the news stories we've seen exploding across our screens in recent days. How our local police departments became so heavily militarized. How so many of our citizens are being stopped for a motor vehicle stop, where a broken tail light can so quickly escalate into a shooting. Honestly so much of this book hit home with regard to the current news stories about Philandro Castile and others, that I had to stop reading this book for a little while and just watch the story play out across my TV screen for what became days. I seriously cannot recommend this book enough, it is very timely indeed!

I came into this book with a pretty decent grasp on Alexander's thesis—thanks in part to the deserved hype her work has received over the years—but found myself captivated as she connected the dots on so many different aspects of mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, Jim Crow, and the historical intersection between classism and racism.

Alexander notes in her preface that she wrote this book specifically for people who already care about racial justice, and if you're one of those people, I urge you to read this with the promise that you will come away from it with a much more comprehensive understanding of our current racial caste system.

It's so well-researched, so informative, and so compelling. I've seen some readers lament that Alexander spends parts of the second half of the book rehashing arguments from the first half, but this approach actually worked for me: by reiterating certain points throughout, she helped me better understand their context within the bigger picture.

Finally, I have to say that reading this book now—during this point in time—was especially impactful. I learned that there's a deep history of politicians and wealthy whites exploiting white working class vulnerabilities and racial resentments in order to preserve power and deliberately driving a wedge between poor whites and poor minorities. With so much talk right now about the economic anxieties of white working class Trump voters, I came away from this book with an even deeper conviction that pandering to poor and working class whites exclusively is absolutely not the answer. Rather, we need a real movement that addresses class struggles among all races so that we don't risk history continuing to repeat itself.

We'd all like to think racism is behind us but, as Michelle Alexander devastatingly lays out in this thoroughly researched tome, it's just evolved and taken different forms. In place of the old Jim Crow laws, we have what she calls the new Jim Crow: mass incarceration thanks to the War on Drugs, which disproportionately affects people of color despite formally being colorblind. This is because of selective enforcement, not because blacks, Hispanics, etc., are more criminally disposed than white people. If anything, you should take away that we need criminal justice reform and we need it now. One other conclusion that might rub some people the wrong way is that we should be race conscious instead of colorblind, if only because our indifference allows oppressive systems to continue. Highly recommended to anyone willing to put in time and effort to see things from a different perspective.