Summary Of The New Jim Crow

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

That is why today we must make a change. In fact, instead of moving beyond subjugation, fierce battles and compromise led to three-fifths compromise which codified viewing Black’s as subhuman. Next, it failed to give our Black friends, even those that have been freed from slavery, the right of equal suffrage. To achieve this right and put an end to our hypocrisy, we must act now.

Henertta uses numbers to show the gravity of the situation that America was faced with, “in 1787, no fewer than 750,000 Blacks (20 percent of the entire population of the United States) were held in hereditary bondage.” White landowners believed that their hard won rights were being infringed upon, slaves were property and crucial to their survival. On the other side slavery had been condemned by the Methodist church as it was a violation of the Golden Law of God and went against the very philosophies that took America into the Revolutionary war. The ingenuity of the American people has never been more apparent than the slow emancipation of African Americans, whether through the enforcement of laws or the disregard of laws, there always seems to be one more step before freedom. The Pennsylvania Emancipation Act that did not release any slaves but granted that if born after 1780, they were free, after 28 years of being a slave to their mother’s master.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Modern Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, the author argues the legal system doing its job “perfectly” well—the United States has simply replaced one caste system, the Jim Crow laws instituted in the 1880s and designed to oppress recently freed black slaves, for another—a system which uses the War on Drugs, which was instituted in the 1970s, to imprison, parole, and detain people of color, keeping the majority of minorities in the United States in a permanent state of incarceration. This an important issue because it affects the everyday lives of people around the nation. Alexander looks in detail at what economists normally miss—the entire legal structure of the courts, parole, probation and laws that effectively turn a person who may have done the crime into a person who is unworthy or “incapable” of rehabilitation. Alexander does a wonderful job of telling the truth, and blaming the right people, who can be liberal or conservative, white or black, who inflict this injustice on others. Alexander’s writing, however, does lack a structure that the reader can follow, which ultimately weakens her overall case.

In the last 240 years, we have grown from a group of colonies that were ruled by a King to being led by the United States’ first black president. At first glance, it would appear race is no longer a bias in this country. Over the next few paragraphs, I intend to defend the need to continue to teach the history of slavery, and its impact on the growth of our nation.

During the 18th and early 19th century, race and slavery were contested subjects in the U.S. The definition of race during this era was not static, and one can find it in the essays written by such individuals as Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Cartwright, and Benjamin Rush. People supporting slavery used race as their main argument by highlighting the differences between Whites and Blacks. Works of Jefferson, Cartwright, and Rush highlight the different conceptions of race during this era. It is, therefore, important to learn about these conceptions to understand how race related to slavery in the past. The paper will thus dig into the analysis of the Jefferson

Racism has been a big issue in America and has left a painful mark in its history. Hidden in America’s stars and stripes lies a dark and cruel past, wherein people particularly the African-Americans were oppressed under institutionalised laws created by the European colonists. Particularly, targeted by these laws were the African-American people who were brought to the America to work as slaves for the white colonists. Institutionalised racism laws in America in the colonial era only gave more power to the white colonists to disrespect the human rights of the African-American people. For the colonists, they see African-American society as an inferior race, deprived of knowledge and even associated them with witchcraft.

Today, many racial and social ideas plague our society and turn people against each other. The Film 13th for example details the history of slavery and post-Civil war legislation which led to the introduction of racial control systems. I think that the film is named 13th because it talks about the 13th amendment, which allowed every person except prisoners to be free. The 13th amendment also allowed the slaves to be free and prohibited slavery. This is important because the film connected slavery to the 13th amendment. In this film, the idea about convict leasing was brought up. In this case, the police arrested freed men and forced them to work under these terms. It is also mentioned in the film that blacks in the 20th century was disenfranchised in the South, and they went through a period of exclusion from political matters. Media in that period depicted blacks as cannibalistic and animal like. Because of this, they were considered the untouchables of society in the 19th to 20th centuries. Alexander titles her book after the New Jim Crow in light of the fact that the Jim Crow law said that non-white individuals now have criminal records and are denied the rights that their granddads used to have. She associates this to the Jim Crow law by clarifying and exhibiting some critical insights about blacks. Alexander said that more African Americans are in restorative control today than there were in 1850. She likewise showed that in 2004, African American men were disappointed

America’s history is shamefully and unfortunately stained with racial, cultural, and ethnic inequality for almost group, excluding rich, straight, white, males. From the very beginning, African American’s alone faced an Everest sized battle to be regarded as equals, and many (most) would argue that they still are trudging up the treacherous slope of prejudice and inequality today. The 14th amendment was passed stating that everyone born in the United States is an American and is guaranteed “equal protection of the laws”. Regardless of that legislation and other legislation (15th amendment, Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968, etc) that has been passed to grant and protect the equality and civil rights of African Americans, the unjustified prejudice built into the backbone of this country manifests itself in private dealings and situations that are difficult to monitor closely. For example, the 15th amendment’s purpose was to grant African Americans with the right to vote. In response, states in the South that harbored and still harbor the most racial prejudice, like Mississippi, instituted devices specifically for preventing African Americans from voting. These devices include but are not limited to partial and unfair literacy tests and exclusively white primaries. The book states that once these hoops to jump through were removed from the voting process in 1965 that Southern African American voting numbers jumped by a whole twenty points.

In the Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jefferson says, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” (US 1776). Obviously, Jefferson was under the assumption that it was common knowledge that these rights only applied to white men. The man tasked to write the Declaration of Independence was a slave holder, so it should have been evident that racism and hate would be a large part of the future in the United States. In “My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglass, this hate and racism is documented from the encounters of the authors life as a slave. After reading this, one may wonder how the United States went so long with such hatred, considering the talks of equality by Thomas Jefferson. The slavery era lasted so long in the United States due to multiple unjust reasons.

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

From mentioning slaves being treated from good to bad and being looked down upon for being a different race, this short story has mentioned numerous issues. This book discusses the issues of constructing social race in America and the division of races. Even though the United States has come a long way from slavery and the amount of hatred racism has brought up, there is still some work that needs to be attended

All this has shown that we are living in a new Era in the United States in which it is “The New Jim Crow”.

The book displays the struggle within the circus and the “Jim Crow South”, the switching back and forth between the two locations allow the reader to determine which location were George and Willie Muse, better off in, which is the argument and purpose of the book. The circus, people were paid highly, with the cost of being exploited for your abnormalities and being on the road constantly, sometimes, without a choice to leave because you could have been kidnapped into the circus, but everyone in the circus (except the staff/customers) was equal. In the Jim Crow south, if you were black, you were likely to be a slave, lynched, killed/insulted/discriminated against severely, or a sharecropper. The book’s meaning shows that no matter where you could be, who you are, or what your circumstances are, you can rise to the top.

The 1950s was a period of great conflict, particularly when segregation of African Americans was at its prime. Historically and evidently, African Americans have been fighting against segregation for decades. One would think that the 21st century would have a turn-around for African Americans but with all police brutality and prejudice against them, it feels as if America has been taken aback 200 years in history. The rate of progression for African Americans is basically non-existent. African Americans, everyday, have to live in fear of white people. Civil Rights Activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Goodman, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, etc. have dedicated and put their lives on the line in order to pursue equality for African Americans. Even with all the strenuous effort to bring change to the world, groups such as the Klu Klux Klan attacked them physically and mentally--making it more difficult to live in America. African Americans have always been treated as inferior and invisible from the beginning; and their existence was treated as if they did not exist as a real person at all. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s writing centers and revolves around the claim that the criminal justice system cultivates and preserves a racial hierarchy that is present in America. Statistics derived from her research demonstrate that more than half of young African American men in any large American city are currently under constraints of the criminal justice