The New Jim Crow Written By Michelle Alexander

During the Civil Rights Era, many black power movements strived to prevent the New Jim Crow from happening. The black man was being oppressed during segregation and treated like animals. The white supremacy, only visualize African Americans as slaves, people who should not be a part of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X drove men and women to fight for his or her rights. However, that was not enough to stop the white supremacy from oppressing African Americans. The Civil Rights movement did put an end to public segregation. It did not put not put an end to the laws being made by the government, which is dominated by the white race. In the book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander discussed how the Civil Rights and black power movements helped African Americans gain their equal rights, but did not help to gain political power. Mass Incarceration is where the African Americans’ lives end because of the social structure created by the government. Blacks are mostly in the lower class because after the Great Depression, Roosevelt only created laws for whites. This allowed the white community to build and move out the cities into better neighborhoods. Leaving the black community behind. The government placed businesses and built big buildings to keep all the blacks in one place. Base on how the black community was viewed as a race and social status, gives this race a higher chance of being behind bars.

In this book The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander gives a look at history racism of African-Americans in relations to slavery and brings us to into modern day racism. Not racism as a form of calling people names or by the means of segregation which would be considered overt racism condemned by society but by colorblindness and by a racial caste system. Alexander argues African-Americans are being discriminated against in the form of mass incarceration. “Mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, polices, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison” (Alexander 2012, pg 14). Upon reading The New Jim Crow I believe African –

The New Jim Crow is a book written by Michelle Alexander that discusses the rebirth of a caste-like system and race-related issues in the United States specific to African-American males and mass incarceration. Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, is a scholarly article that examines and critiques mass incarceration as well as the analogy of the Criminal Justice system being the “new Jim Crow.”

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a very poignant piece. Throughout the work Alexander makes it a point to draw parallels between the current judicial systems implementation of declarations coming out of the executive branch and the lack action from the legislative branch to correct the overbroad execution that has ultimately lead to a disproportionate amount of Blacks currently incarcerated. The book was interesting to say the least. I feel as if Alexander did a proper job of laying the historical foundation down for the reader and describing that from the earliest time in American history the Black people were invited into the land merely as a compromise and because the Blacks seemed to be the most economic choice for the

Upon reading Michelle Alexander’s book, it became very clear the point she was working to get across. To be brutally honest, I was not at all interested in reading this book. I only chose this book because it was cheaper than the only other book the class was given the option to read. The title itself explains it all; The New Jim Crow. Judging from the title alone, I assumed this was just another book on theories of conspiracy. Ways the government or “the man” was trying to keep a “brother” or a “sister” down. Personally, I don’t like to believe that our federal government could or would do something secretive that was against the will or the best interest of the American people no matter their race or gender, which is why I prefer not to give

I’m white, Irish Catholic to be precise. I’ve spent my life around white people, been raised in white schools, and lived in Valencia, a rather white town. And through my experience with this particular class of folks, I’ve realized something fundamental: many of us don’t know what we're talking about in regard to race.

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.

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s was the final blow to institutional racism. People of color have been on a steady downfall since the days of race-based slavery. Barack Obama, a black man, to the highest political office in the United States is proof that we lived in a “Color Blind” society. Great progress has been made in achieving a fairer society. Alexander argues that this story largely misrepresents the conditions of poor and working class blacks today. “Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia who managed poor whites, indentured servants and blacks.” Slaves were in the lowest position they could possibly be in; even though the whites were free most of them lived in extreme poverty. Slaves were defined as three-fifths of a man not even considered a human being. After the death of slavery had been gone race still lived on , and is living on today. (Page 4; The Birth Of Slavery) Civil Rights Act of 1866 the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery, the fourteenth amendment “Prohibited states from denying citizens due process and; “equal protection of the laws”, the fifteenth amendment “Provided the right to vote should not be denied by anyone no matter what your race is”.

Those who have held a tight grip on power and prosperity have always excluded themselves from the norm and have put themselves on pedestals. When the thirst of nobility is quenched, minority groups are recognized as inferior; this is what occurred during the Jim Crow era in the decades subsequent to the civil war. Following the release of all African American slaves, it was a priority of the intolerable Southern states to reassure their white superiority. This was done by implementing the Jim Crow caste system which limited the rights and abilities of African Americans. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reflecting the life of author Harper Lee "To Kill A Mockingbird" shows accurate demonstrations of the Jim Crow south; this novel takes place in the early 1930 's in a town called Maycomb. The story involves a woman named Jean-Louis, informally called Scout throughout the novel, narrating the events of her childhood life. An innocent African American man has been accused of raping a white woman, and Scout 's father has been unanimously appointed to his defense. Her father seeks victory, but proving the man 's innocence seems far out of reach as it is a taboo to favor a black man 's side over a white women 's story. It is exceptionally difficult to develop a story in a time like this because the level of racism and hatred is at the extreme, us as an audience must acknowledge that 's doing not come from the author but rather the period. Harper Lee executes such an

In The Ethics of Living Jim Crow we are introduced to the narrator, Richard Wright, born on 1908. The 20th century was supposed to be a period of change for African Americans in every state of The United States. After the civil war African American obtained the right to be free, national citizenship and voting rights. The laws created after the Civil War protected African Americans they were not followed entirely. In order to make it permissible to break the rules in some instances, the white society created Jim Crow laws that limited the rights to be free, national citizenship and voting.

The author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. She has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics. Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Upon completing law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before teaching at universities, Alexander served as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California. During her years at the ACLU she began to look into the criminal justice system and

The New Jim Crow has captivated many Americans’ attention since it was published in 2010. Michelle Alexander has become the poster woman for ending the drug war and mass incarceration, for policy reform and for mass movement organizing. She wrote this book for liberals like her to alert them that this system—in which people are being targeted, criminalized, stereotyped to support popular complacent consent for criminalization, incarcerated, and then denied full citizenship upon release—is a legacy to the racial caste system that was Jim Crow. While this I believe to be true, I also believe that there is more to unfold in the story than Alexander has presented in her book.

The same enslavement of African Americans that occurred in the 18th and 19th century still exists today in the form of imprisonment. Imprisonment carries on the unwarranted legacy of slavery in our modern world. According to a study done by Michelle Alexander, “There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began” (Alexander). In addition, she also found out that, “As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race” (Alexander). Legislations such as the 13th and 14th amendments claim to free our nation’s

Almost anyone you talk to has heard the name “Jim Crow.” Yet, not everyone will be able to tell you what that name implies. Jim Crow refers to the unjust and harsh laws enforced upon men and women of color in the time after the Civil War, up until the 1960’s. Men and women of color were finally free from slavery, but the Jim Crow laws assured that they were still unfairly treated and oppressed. Michelle Alexander claims, in her work, The New Jim Crow, that the justice system we have today still discriminates and unfairly punishes men and women of color. She claims that the policies set in place by our government officials have led to African Americans being seen as only criminals and has developed a racial caste system that is similar to the one created by the former Jim Crow laws. She is determined in her belief that the biggest cause of this was the “War on Drugs” that focused on cocaine usage in the 1980’s, which has resulted in racial profiling of African Americans as criminals. This racial profiling has thus resulted in a mass incarceration of African Americans. So, is Michelle Alexander right? Are the claims she makes credible? Is there a racial caste system created by U.S. government policies to inhibit, discriminate, and oppress African Americans? If so, what can be done to change things, and how will it be accomplished? What is the best way to go about solving this problem? I will answer these questions and more with my own arguments in this book

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.