Effects Of The New Jim Crow

There are many historical parallels between Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration. Both of these systems were made “due to a desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities, and racial bias of poor and working class whites for political or economic gain” (Alexander 191). Segregation laws were made to deflect social tensions from whites to blacks. Another example is making laws more discriminative. “In the Jim Crow era whites competed by passing harsher laws to keep blacks in prisons. Currently legislators looking to make drug laws harsher to incarcerate more blacks and latinos.” The most obvious parallel between the Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration is the legalization of discrimination. During the Jim Crow era blacks were denied the right to vote by poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The fifteenth amendment states “the rights of citizens of the United States to vote should not be denied on the account of race, color or previous condition of servitude” (Alexander 192). African Americans were not able to pay poll taxes or pass literacy tests, yet if a white male could not pass these hurdles he could still possibly be able to vote due to the

The New Jim Crow is a book that gives a look on how discrimination is still and at some post more prevalent today than it was in the 1850s. Author Michelle Alexander dives into the justice system and explains how a lot of practices and beliefs from slavery times are just labeled differently now. The labeling creates legal discrimination, but most people over look it because it is hidden with words such as “criminals” or “felon” in order to legally enslave and segregate a certain type of people. This discrimination is located in multiple areas of the U.S. government. Alexander goes through the ways of how discrimination is still prevalent in employment, the housing market, education, and basic voting rights. Alexander

Racism in the United States has not remained the same over time since its creation. Racism has shifted, changed, and shaped into unrecognizable ways that fit into the fabric of the American society to render it nearly invisible to the majority of Americans. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shatters this dominantly held belief. The New Jim Crow makes a reader profoundly question whether the high rates of incarceration in the United States is an attempt to maintain blacks as an underclass. Michelle Alexander makes the assertion that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” using the criminal justice system and colorblind rhetoric. (Alexander 2). The result is a population of Black and Latino men who face barriers and deprivation of rights as did Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Therefore, mass incarceration has become the new Jim Crow.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander develops a compelling analogy on how mass incarceration is similar to the Jim Crow era, and is a “race-making institution.” She begins her work with the question, “Where have all the black men gone?” (Alexander, 178) She demonstrates how the media and Obama have failed to give an honest answer to this question, that the large majority of them or in prison. She argues that in order to address this problem, we must be honest about the fact that this is happening, and the discrimination with the African American communities that is putting them there.

Michelle Alexander’s the new Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness examine the Jim Crow practices post slavery and the mass incarceration of African-American. The creation of Jim Crows laws were used as a tool to promote segregation among the minority and white American. Michelle Alexander’s the new Jim Crow Mass takes a look at Jim Crow laws and policies were put into place to block the social progression African-American from the post-slavery to the civil rights movement. Fast-forward to 2008 the election of Barack Obama certified that African-Americans were no longer viewed as second-class citizens instead African-Americans are equal to their white counterparts. However, Michelle Alexander

The old Jim Crow was a racial caste system in America that separate Black people from Whites like school and bathroom separations. Whites were privileged to have all of the superior public necessities , while blacks were free labors and viewed as inferior servants between 1877 and the 1960s. The Jim Crow system create racial caste that Whites are above all Blacks. Law was legal to prevent African Americans from going to the same school that Whites go to, and they could

Jim Crow law in U.S. history was any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine performed beginning in 1828. The term came to be a derogatory epiblast for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life. Southern state legislatures passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons with color”. The Jim Crow law was from 1877 to 1954. (Britannica.com)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander published in 2012, is a 261 page book detailing how mass incarceration has become the new form of legalized discrimination.

To offer evidence to the reader of the racial motivations behind mass incarceration, Alexander follows the history of the racial caste system. The history begins with slavery, which was the original form of African American oppression. With slavery, according to Alexander, barriers were created between lower class whites and blacks, which led to decades of racism later (Alexander, 2010). After the death of slavery, the racism lived on and Jim Crow laws were created after Reconstruction to

The whole Jim Crow Law rules were based on the separate but equal properties. Any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the south between the end of reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim crow laws affected public places such as schools, housing jobs, parks, cemeteries, and public gathering places. Ohio was one of the first to ban interracial marriage. There was forms of segregation before the laws came into place. For instance some people had the mentality that they could work with a slave as long as the slave knew his or her place. Brown vs. Board of Education is an example of a Jim Crow law being put into action. After the supreme court unanimously held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause.

“Jim Crow Laws were statutes and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South. In theory, it was to create "separate but equal" treatment, but in practice Jim Crow Laws condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities.” The Jim Crows Laws created tensions and disrespect towards blacks from whites. These laws separated blacks and whites from each other and shows how race determines how an individual is treated. The Jim Crow laws are laws that are targeted towards black people. These laws determine how an individual is treated by limiting their education, having specific places where blacks and whites could or could not go, and the punishments for the “crime”

Michelle Alexander throughout her book introduces us to the way the “New Jim Crow”works in today's society. This new jim crow can be taken as a racial caste throughout the United States. She defines this undercaste as “A lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society (Alexander pg 13) Not only does this have to do because of mass incarceration rates among black men, but it also adds to the effects of what the branded felons must face beyond the prison walls. She mentions this early on in her book that

The era of Jim Crow began after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, in which through the rebuilding of the South, whites established laws and customs that forced freed slaves to stay marginalized and targeted by Southern whites. The purpose of these Jim Crow ideas was to keep blacks and white separated, and to also keep blacks from progressing in society. For instance, Southern whites forced blacks to take literacy tests before they could be considered able to vote. From the start of this Jim Crow era, racial compromise was already occurring. One of the most obvious examples of this compromise comes from the real name of the era. “Jim Crow” was a name used in a

Racial discrimination in the United States has been a radical issue plaguing African Americans from as early as slavery to the more liberal society we see today. Slavery is one of the oldest forms of oppression against African Americans. Slaves were brought in from Africa at increasingly high numbers to do the so-called dirty work or manual labor of their white owners. Many years later, after the abolishment of slavery came the Jim Crow era. In the 1880s, acts known as the Jim Crow laws were enacted by Southern states to keep oppression of African Americans alive. These laws helped to legalize segregation between blacks and whites. Slavery and Jim Crow were created to regulate how African Americans functioned in society. Slaves were refused the right to vote, refused citizenship, refused education, and labeled as incompetent as a way for whites to keep what Author Michelle Alexander of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness calls “social control”. Alexander argues that mass incarceration is the new modern “racial caste system” of social control. She further goes on to claim that this new system of mass incarceration has replaced the old social systems that were used to oppress African Americans such as slavery and Jim Crow. The system of mass incarceration fueled by the War on Drugs was established as a form of racial control. This new system puts people of color into an endless cycle of

In the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, her main focus was to show how racism and segregation never really ended since the Civil War. Instead of ending they took a new different form. Michelle Alexander supports this argument using a fair amount of evidence.