Black Codes Definition

As a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, blatant racism is no longer viewed as acceptable social behavior. However, the absence of blatant individual racism cannot be equated to the absence of structural racial discrimination. With the Thirteenth Amendment preserving slavery as punishment in the prison system, criminality is being manipulated by the media to be associated with race. We see the full effects of the overrepresentation with War on Drugs legislation, which are policies that categorized drug use as a crime instead of health issue pushed forward by the Reagan administration. The master narrative of the criminality painted the legislation as colorblind, or nondiscriminatory, policies that will benefit all citizens and created

     Imagine yourself wrongly convicted of a crime. You spent years in jail awaiting your release date. It finally comes, and when they let you out, they slap handcuffs around your wrists and tell you every single action you do. In a nutshell, that’s how the Black Codes worked. The southerners wanted control over the blacks after the Civil War, and states created their own Black Codes.

In today’s modern world, many people would be surprised to find out that there is still a racial caste system in America. After witnessing the election of a black president, people have started believing that America has entered a post-racial society. This is both a patently false and dangerous mindset. The segregation and stigma of race is still very much alive in our society. Instead of a formalized institution such as slavery or Jim Crow, America has found a new way to continue the marginalization of blacks by using the criminal justice system. In Michelle Alexander’s book “ The New Jim Crow”, she shows how America’s “ War on Drugs “ has become a tool of racial segregation and how the discretionary enforcement of drug laws has

She states, “viewing his own campaign ad, Nixon reportedly remarked with glee that the ad “hits it right on the nose, It’s all about those damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there”” (Alexander 47). The commercial gives the impression that Nixon’s primary aim is to reinstall law and order in the United States but his reaction to the ad shows that Nixon’s just targeting racial minorities. This supports Alexander’s argument that the “War on crime” is really a war on minorities. This example also reveals how politicians exploit people’s emotion; Nixon ran his “law and order” campaign in 1968, a period of rising crime rates in the United States. Hence Nixon utilized the public’s fear of crime to keep blacks from progressing just as it has always been done throughout American history. Through this quote, Alexander exemplifies some of the ways-being deceitful, exploiting the public’s fear-through which the government keeps minorities down. By providing this example of Nixon himself saying that the “law and order” campaign is all about the minority groups out there, Alexander gives her readers the perfect evidence to support her

1: Black Codes: A body of laws, statutes, and rules enacted by southern states immediately after the Civil War to regain control over the freed slaves, maintain white supremacy, and ensure the continued supply of cheap labor.

In 1865, Louisiana created “Black Codes”, a set of rules that controlled the lifestyle of African Americans. It sounded very similar to slavery, going to extremes such as that every African American had to be of regular service to a white person. The historical significance of these codes is that although they were soon demolished with the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, Jim Crow laws were soon established after(Document 6). All the states and territories of the

This “war on drugs,” which all subsequent presidents have embraced, has created a behemoth of courts, jails, and prisons that have done little to decrease the use of drugs while doing much to create confusion and hardship in families of color and urban communities.1,2Since 1972, the number of people incarcerated has increased 5-fold without a comparable decrease in crime or drug use.1,3 In fact, the decreased costs of opiates and stimulants and the increased potency of cannabis might lead one to an opposing conclusion.4 Given the politics of the war on drugs, skyrocketing incarceration rates are deemed a sign of success, not failure. I don’t totally agree with the book (I think linking crime and black struggle is even older than she does, for instance) but I think The New Jim Crow pursues the right line of questioning. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility

Also, it is a challenge to those working in the areas of civil rights and social activism to rise up and organize against the system that supports the New Jim Crow. Her analogy of the New Jim Crow and a caste system is also credible in terms of how it applies to the plight of convicted felons. As she examines the long-term consequences of the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” on criminal convictions and the loss of civil liberties, Alexander paints a clear picture of the casual, almost apathetic, manner in which our society has bought into the belief that we require constant police protection in order to live safe. In addition, she’s not afraid to challenge people for their careless disregard for those who have been relegated to the fringes of civil society. The mantra may be, “Do The Crime…Do The Time,” but in today’s era of the New Jim Crow, the “time” appears to be endless for those with a criminal

For the presentation, I focused on the ethical issues that can be defended by policing and imprisonment. I used the text about mass incarceration by Alexander to support my thoughts and views. From the “Rebirth of a Caste” a question that occurred to me is whether or not it is ethical to create a war on drugs for political gain. I believe the racism aspect of policing began long before the rates of incarceration increased. From the text people believed that “Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was causing an increase in crime, [as well as] civil rights protests being depicted as criminal rather than political protests”(Pg 41). Everyone has the right to protest as long as it is not violent, however, society depicted these protests for equal rights as criminal. This could be caused by their perspectives as a change in society was massive due to the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow Laws. On top of this, the “media frenzy the [war on drugs] campaign inspired simply could not have come at a worse time for African Americans” according to Alexander (Pg 50). The media reinforced stereotypes by featuring the black women as crack whore and men as predators. It is not ethical to use racism for media attention but African Americans were an easy target. However, Nixon states that “every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them” (Pg 41). The statement directly relates to Aristotle’s view on ethics that

These codes accomplished Mississippi’s seeking control by having the judicial system create the threat for fines and the fear of possible imprisonment. The Black Codes was just an improved way of slavery for some and strict rules for those who were supposedly

I think that Black codes were very cruel to all African Americans, and were used to single out African American. Even though they had all the rights that white people did , but no one really saw it as that. I also think that black codes were unequal in every sense and being because many people viewed african americans as nothing, just because of their skin color. I have heard of the black codes in the movie called “ The Help” when Elaine Stein was asking Aibileen Clark to help her get it known of what it is like to be the help and Aibileen brought up that she wasn't allowed to do it, and if she were to ever get caught she would get into trouble. I have also heard about the black codes briefly in my previous history classes but did not go

In this article, Bandele focuses on a short filmed narrated by Jay Z that depicts historical scenes pertaining to the war on drugs and Nixon administration as it down spiraled into the making of the future. Artwork of Molly Crabapple gives insight and provides a vision statement to the historical images. The events, particularly, correlate to the historical events that significantly impacted the African American community under the disguises of the Rockefeller drug laws and the 1973 statutes. The body of laws were administrated in New York during the war on drugs and consequently resulted in the increase of racialized incarceration rates and enacted the development of punitive criminal policies throughout the nation. The film continues to dispute the affect war on drugs, and the present-day

As the history predicates from slavery to Jim Crow Laws, policies were enacted in America with the intention of marginalizing African Americans. Which in turn created a caste system. At the bottom of the caste are African Americans and at the top are the wealthy and affluent individuals( Alexander).Policies regarding the criminal justice system in this country, have created privileges and limitations. As the narrative may explain, the War on Drugs is a new form of Jim Crow. Such as that Jim Crow laws were effectively placed to stigmatize black people, the War on Drugs runs a parallel concept. In the documentary Bastards of the Party, illustrates how drug laws are race policy. Mr. Sloan, the narrator, depicts how drugs in his neighborhood were a vertically integrated business; only the youth in black communities were being hired as the labor market. Speculators say that the drugs being sold in America, specifically underprivileged black neighborhoods, were to help fund the war

The privileges or immunities may be considered problems and benefits of citizenship versus restrictions of being an alien. Citizenship by either laws of the United States or England permitted residents to hold and transfer possessions to receive, to create and implement agreements and provide proof, to be free of any distinct trade limitation such as higher duties, restricted leaseholds for dealers, or subject to penalties and expulsion due to war or other things (Madison, 2010).

Vietnam protesters and unrest at college campuses gradually faded from the national agenda, but crime and its racial subtext stayed on. Concerns about crime played a prominent role in subsequent presidential campaigns, perhaps most famously and vividly with the 1988 “Willie Horton ad.” Law-and-order politics evolved away from cultural questions and toward a narrower conversation about crime and punishment. This conversation, research shows, has been characterized by avoidance of overt racial terminology but undergirded by an indelible linkage to race.