Jim Crow: The Cruel Behavior Of African-Americans

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

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness goes into great detail on race related issues that were specific to black males, the mass incarceration, and how that lead to the development of institutionalized racism in the United States. She compares the Jim Crow with recent phenomenon of mass incarceration and points out that the mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that have been working together to warrant the subordinating status of black males. In this paper I will go into a brief examination of the range of issues that she mentions in her book that are surrounding the mass incarceration of black male populations.

The New Jim Crow is a book that discusses how legal practices and the American justice system are harming the African American community as a whole, and it argues that racism, though hidden, is still alive and well in our society because of these practices. In the book, Michelle Alexander, author and legal scholar, argues that legal policies against offenders have kept and continue to keep black men from becoming first class citizens, and she writes that by labeling them as “criminals,” the justice system and society in general is able to act with prejudice against them and subordinate black Americans who were previously incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, by limiting their access to services as a result of their ‘criminal status’ and therefore, further degrading their quality of life. The New Jim Crow urges readers to acknowledge the injustice and racial disparity of our criminal justice system so that this new, more covert form of racism in society can be stopped.

I was also, intrigued by Alexanders view on the war and drugs and it's relation to the African American community. African Americans are punished longer for the same crimes that whites commit, are likely to be critiqued for it longer as well. She further elaborates by explaining how black children are now raised by by single parents, due to the mass imprisonment of black fathers. The aftermath includes being "...denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era"(pg). In other words it can be clearly seen that blacks are selected and targeted, this system

Wright chose to title the piece “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” because since Jim Crow had such cruel ethics toward the people of color, the piece involves him explaining the various situations that he experienced in which he was mistreated by white people. At the end of the chapter Wright states “Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble” (Wright 13), Which shows Wright calling his “Jim Crow education” going from “brutally cruel” to “subtly cruel”. His reasoning for this is that since he chose to behave the way that the white people expected him to behave, he was able to succeed in being treated in a less cruel way by the white people. Overall, Wright chose to title the piece “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” because he lived Jim Crow, or he experienced being poorly treated by the white people, which are apart of Jim Crow’s ethics.

Well the first chapter was mainly about the original Jim Crow white people discriminating against the blacks. the fact that some black have seen the better life doesn’t mean that the disrespect from the whites are over originally blacks didn’t come enslaved a lot of them were treated as indentured slaves .as time passed whites were calling us savages because of the way we SERVIVED around 1770 the whites degraded from Africa Americans to Negros

Jim Crow was the name of a racial system instituted after slavery to subordinate free blacks and it was a system instituted primarily in the South that legalized segregation between black and white people. With these set of laws, black and white people lived in separate neighborhoods, attended separate schools, had separate public restrooms, and went to separate restaurants and movie theaters. These laws were instituted under the pretext that it was better for everyone not to mix the races as well as the concept of separate but equal. Obviously, there were alternative motives and the notion separate but equal was false. The reality behind Jim Crow was separate and unequal access from 1890 to 1965. W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Booker T. Washington were leaders who fought to end the injustices resulted from Jim Crow- segregation, lynching, and mass incarceration. This information is what I learned from first grade to my senior year of high school. This information is what I read in various books. We never discussed parks.

Many are unaware of the effects that race has played in their lives over the years. Some may not understand its implications, but are very oblivious to it. Race can influence such things like attitude and behavior. Nowadays being white or black means something more than just a Crayola color. No longer are they just colors, they are races with their own rules and regulations. People of color have been inferior to the white race for centuries. In their own way Zora Neale Hurston shows this concept in her story “How it feels to be Colored Me” as does Richard Wright in his autobiographical sketch “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”.

The loud chatter of the audience at the old Park Theater in New York was for a one man show performed by Thomas Rice. To the all white audience, Jim Crow was vigorously funny. Clothed in a stable boy costume and a straw hat, his white face darkened by coal in a behaviour recognized as “blackface.” He danced and sang and even spoke in mockery of the black slang. He portrayed blacks as ignorant, greedy and foolish. Even though his act was for entertainment purposes, Thomas Rice implied through his act that African Americans were purposeless. This encouraged people to be less compassionate towards African Americans and these feelings eventually created what we now know about as the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws were a system of laws that

I am writing to inform you about the insight of the famous movie entitled, “The new Jim crow”. There are several insights of this work. Michelle Alexander teaches law at the State University of Ohio, after a career as a civil rights lawyer, both in activist militaries defending fundamental freedoms (she led the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU - American Civil Liberties Union - in Northern California) and in a law firm where she specialized in group actions against racial and gender discrimination. She published in 2010 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness which became a bestseller and relaunched the debate in the United States on the over-incarceration of black men.

Child Psychology is a branch of Psychology that focuses on the study of the mental and social developments of children. In the book “Uncle Tom’s Children” by Richard wright, two of the stories clearly display this. As the events of the stories unfold, we are able to see how the main characters’ personalities and mental states change, which involves beliefs, attitude, actions, change of heart, etc. The topic of “Child Psychology” is shown in the stories “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and “Big Boy Leaves Home”, through how the personalities of the main characters change due to the experiences they go through and the situations that they are exposed to.

The Jim Crow Laws, that enforced racist segregation, were abolished 1964. Racism was not. Turn on the news today and you will most likely see something related to some sort of racist act. Police brutality with racism is a huge social injustice issue right now and we can see today how people of color are effected through campaigns such as “Black Lives Matter.” After reading the two essays and doing a little research on Jim Crow, it was extremely evident how those laws deeply affected those affected by them and I still see this as an issue today. I think that it is crucial to understand that these laws indirectly still affect people to this day, even after being abolished years and years ago. In Richard Writes essay, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: an Autobiographical Sketch, we see him struggle just doing daily activities in his life. Although the Jim Crow laws are no longer in place, it does not mean that it does not have an effect on todays world and racism is still very alive and well today and that is an issue that needs to be solved in todays society.

In a country where Jim Crow laws are a thing of the past, and we just witnessed our first black president, many people believe that we have overcome racism as a country. While on the surface that may seem accurate, in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although racism doesn’t play the same immediate role that it played decades ago, it has taken on a much more passive-aggressive role. Gone are the days of blatant dehumanization and unequal rules. In today’s society you can find racism in far more subtle ways. Institutional discrimination, our government, and even our police all play major roles in today’s racism, and will continue to corrupt our country for generations despite all of our efforts to instill equality upon America.

This essay will argue that white people were violently racist towards African Americans in the south because the threat of them succeeding economically, educationally, and socially created competition for things that whites felt they were entitled to. Jim Crow laws were created as a way to control the success of African Americans and prevent them from reaching their full potential in society. Evidence of their actions proves this in the laws they made, the ways they treated them, and the words said about them. Whites felt entitled to these things because they viewed themselves as “supreme”.

Stories that go untold are often never heard and forgotten through time. The author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, by writing her book understandingly so went out of her way to document the stories and pain of millions of minorities, whom in the land of the free are instead forced into undoubtful imprisonment. Alexander has spent most of her life fighting racial injustice and teaching about civil rights. A graduate from Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University, Michelle Alexander became a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar. She has dedicated her life to fighting the racial bias in the criminal justice system and ending mass incarceration, devoting much of her time to writing about and spreading the awareness of the racial caste system that we are currently in. In addition, Alexander has spent several years as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which also lead a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement (NewJimCrow.com). In her work, The New Jim crow, Alexander cautiously argues that from the beginning of the United States all the way to its first foundations, can one find that the foundations were layered upon a racial caste system to which just like the United States Constitution, can essentially adapt overtime and exploit the original undercaste of minorities that were its earliest victims; while her book is well supported through her informative use of historical facts and events, her