The Everlasting Jim Crow System

In Chapter, one The Rebirth of Caste examines the history of racial social control in the United States. Alexander refers to the shifting forms and habitual patterns of "racial caste" system. She vies that proponents of "racial hierarchy" have been able to guarantee its recurrence after effective ends following the end of slavery and the dismantling of the original Jim Crow. She describes the starting point of it all is to bring about the separation of the poor whites and blacks; creating a hierarchy in the United States social class. The author believes this is possible largely, by appealing to the biases and uncertainties of lower-class whites. This caste-based system has existed in three different forms: slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Alexander’s important influence is to show how each of these forms was brought about deliberately and how, in its latest form of mass incarceration, the caste system continues to achieve its aims of segregation.

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.

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 New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is

Following the Civil War, previous slaves were granted their freedom, after the North's victory. However, the dispute of equality was not settled between the two territories trickling new challenges into a time duration known as the Reconstruction period. Many in the South were unhappy with the results postwar, and created laws and customs to maintain “slavery” or inequality any way they could. Reconstruction succeeded in an extent by transforming how people of color were viewed in society and by law, from being slaves to freedmen and finally to equal members in society.

Although the Jim Crow legislation system no longer exists, Alexander claims that this racial caste system has taken a different form in the society. Like the Jim Crow system, the incarceration system works to lock up black men though legal frames work. In fact, it is common to hear that black men are arrested much more than white men. In Alexander’s view, many black men are arrested and segregated in American

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 granted African Americans citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote. These amendments were passed in an effort to combat racism and reshape public perception of blacks, however, these laws were hard to enforce and Southern states developed their own laws like the Black Codes to control the newly freed slaves. Jim Crow-era laws in the South like the poll tax and literacy tests prevented many blacks in the South from voting. Anyone who tried to break Southern traditions was subject to violence and intimidation from the Ku Klux Klan.

Throughout the Reconstruction period in the United States after the Civil War, African American’s were given many new rights, such as citizenship and the right to vote. One of these new rights was enacted in 1869, the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African American men the right to vote. Many southern states, however, did not approve of this new amendment and sought ways to prevent African Americans from voting. Post-confederate, Democratic states found ways to disenfranchise the African American community. Preventive actions ranged in severity from murder and lynching, to fraudulent actions at the ballots, and even enforcing new state laws to prevent African American votes. The newly created Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment were supposed

This system has three different form of existence, slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration (New Jim Crow). Another important claim of this chapter is that these controlling measures were not accidents, she gives examples of how blacks were incarcerated at a higher rate than any other race because of a few factors. Those factors being, the economic collapse of many inner cities, massive budget increase for drug-law enforcement, ongoing racial prejudices and media mongering to put fear of drugs on American

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.

In the book the New Jim Crow Laws there is racial discrimination on the African American people in the American society. What is racial discrimination? It is refusing somebody based on race. In the United States we have been racial discriminate on the African American people and that is what cause the south and north to go civil wat was because slavery and racism that existed and even still to this day. In the south the black were less and treated unequal to them historically even today were are still experiencing a civil rights movement. In the recent years society had a civil right movement when Obama become the first black president in history in the 2008 and still serving until 2016. In this book is comparing the pre Jim Crow laws to Current the Jim Crow laws.

In the article, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander vigorously argues the means in which the American prison system has become a redesigned form of disenfranchisement for poor people of color, while comparing it to the racially motivated Jim Crow laws. Alexander begins the article by making powerful assumptions about the readers; she states that “[racial caste] is [the subject] that most Americans seem content to ignore”. Although this may offend the readers, she includes a personal narrative explaining her initial disbelief to the “new racial caste system” and by doing so, Alexander displays how easily it is for one to deny controversial issues on race without proper knowledge on the subject. Moreover, the use of personal narrative makes

In December of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment officially banned slavery throughout the United States of America. After multiple centuries of chattel slavery, predominately in the American South, African-Americans were finally set free from bondage. The fourteenth and fifteenth amendments quickly followed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and granting African American men the right to vote, respectively. Naturally, Americans denoted these momentous legislative feats, collectively packaged as the Reconstruction Amendments, as a means of celebration for African-Americans. However, in order to rectify the extensive damage that the American Civil War caused on the South’s infrastructure, labor systems, and economy, white Americans went to extreme lengths via the legal system in order to mimic the antebellum practices of slavery in the South. As newly freed African-Americans sought to exercise their nascent constitutional rights, they were constantly slammed with new, legally permissible practices of exploitation and segregation.

Under the 13th amendment slavery was abolished and blacks finally gained fair representation in congress, which was changed from a slave counting as 3/5 of a person to a freed man counting as a whole person. Also African Americans were taught to read and write, through organizations like the Freedman’s Bureau, so that they could become involved in politics. These new laws made the south stronger politically since the overwhelming numbers of blacks in the south now were completely counted in the senate, which made the representation of the colored community important. The 14th amendment brought further equality with the granting of citizenship and due process to freed blacks. Under the Reconstruction act, for states to readmit to the union they had to grant full citizenship rights to all freed blacks. However, even though blacks finally received the same citizenship rights and were entitled to due process they did not fully gain political equality since they did not yet have the right to vote. The final amendment that brought equality to blacks was the 15th amendment which finally gave blacks the right to vote. This amendment gave blacks the same say in politics and who was elected. African Americans right to vote was the final event in bringing about political equality to freed slaves. However, organizations of white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan scared blacks

The 13th Amendment in 1865 officially abolished slavery, but African Americans reputations in the post-war South still seemed unsure and huge obstacles awaited them during the Reconstruction period. African Americans received citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment in 1868. Then in 1870 the 15th amendment was created and they received the right to vote, but often their rights were ignored and it was hard for former slaves to gain anything in the post-war economy thanks to black codes and regressive