resource guide on mass incarceration session #2 michelle alexander’s the new jim crow – an...

Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration

Session #2Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow – An Overview

“The New Jim Crow”

A term coined by Michelle Alexander

U.S. IncarcerationSystem has been called



• Radically separate and unequal conditions STILL exist for Black Americans today…

• … on account of the operations of the criminal justice system.

What “The New Jim Crow” Says

• The criminal justice system stigmatizes & punishes people of color out of proportion to their actions…

• … while claiming to be neutral toward every person’s race.


• The word “CASTE” describes a system of oppression which assumes that people’s race or ethnicity acts as an automatic marker for their economic status.

• Example of CASTE: Soon after large-scale transport of Africans to America, it was assumed that everyone of African descent was or had been enslaved.


• The U.S. caste system is based on the idea of white supremacy.

• Example: Lower-class whites will support policies that keep them poor… as long as those policies also keep Black people “down.”


• The U.S. “caste system” presents itself as simply “the way things are” – to function as a system of social control.


• EXAMPLE: Black men picked up for “vagrancy” in the South were effectively forced back into a kind of slavery, as county sheriffs farmed them out to do heavy work for local employers – who in turn paid off the sheriffs for their help.


• President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” left in place the Jim Crow laws as a way to gain support from Southern white legislators for New Deal programs.


• The 20th-century civil rights movement did away with official Jim Crow segregation. But it did nothing to change the second-class citizenship experienced by Black people economically or socially… with one exception.


The exception?•Affirmative action in college admission and in the workplace has been able to benefit a fairly small segment of the African-American community.


• Alexander argues that affirmative action has functioned as a “bribe” (her term) that allows whites to proclaim that America’s racial problem has been solved.

• Alexander also says that affirmative action masks the ongoing suffering of most Black Americans.


• Alexander argues that the vast expansion of prisons and jails, filled with mostly black and brown bodies, represents the latest incarnation of the racialized caste system on a massive scale.


• Jail and prison expansion wasn’t presented to Americans as a massive and racialized caste system. Rather, it has been pitched as a public safety issue -- “law and order” – since the 1970s.


• NOT A COINCIDENCE: Also in the ‘70s, U.S. industries that once employed large numbers of Black men (steel, auto, meatpacking, stevedoring) started to collapse. This coincided with the mass incarceration of Black men.


America’s racialized caste system•How do you feel about Alexander’s core idea that an underlying caste system has operated throughout U.S. history – even from before the time that our nation was formed?

Break for Discussion and Q & A

• Michelle Alexander declares that the current embodiment of white supremacy can be found in the shockingly high number of Black people we incarcerate.


• The New Jim Crow can’t work unless the system is able to round up a lot of black and brown bodies without much regard for fairness or due process.

• Alexander tells us how it happens.


Police officers get broad discretion to wage the War on Drugs, and racial profiling is routine in this context:

• “Stop & frisk” Black pedestrians.

• “Stop & search” vehicles of Black drivers.


• Alexander notes how the War on Drugs effectively voids the Fourth Amendment’s constitutional prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

• Alexander also exposes the near-total breakdown of due process and the presumption of innocence once a Black person has been arrested or charged.


• Alexander, an attorney and law professor, looks very carefully at unequal rates of arrest, conviction, and sentencing for identical infractions and “crimes” carried out by whites and by persons of color.


• She notes that a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions has made it all but impossible to challenge racial bias under the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law).


• Alexander shows how our legal system officially pronounces itself free of racism – despite the drastically different penalties and outcomes facing Black people caught up in the system.


Her conclusion:It’s UTTERLY FALSE to say that America enjoys a colorblind justice system.


Lockdown and the Color of JusticeNow that you’ve heard Alexander’s rationale for contending that justice is not colorblind, how do you feel about it? Do you agree? Disagree? Why?

Break for Discussion

• How can people simultaneously both “know” and “not know” the scale and severity of the racialized mass incarceration system?

•Michelle Alexander addresses this.


• “Not knowing” has much to do with pre-existing patterns of racial segregation and isolation – made worse by the system’s way of sweeping up young Black men en masse, then returning them to their neighborhoods, spent and broken.


• The round-up of Black males begins early, often in middle school or even in the early grades. Any form of acting out or acting up by Black children is met with much more severe punishments than those given to white children.


• School discipline issues are largely treated as criminal issues these days. Black children can soon acquire a record without even knowing what is happening.


• Many Black juveniles treat their entry into the school-to-prison pipeline as normal and expected. From an early age, knowing the system, they expect to be in trouble with the law.


• The high visibility of some Black individuals in the media, sports, entertainment, politics, even the academy helps to mask the suffering created by incarceration and the permanent stigmatizing of incarcerated people.


• Those who don’t want to know about racialized mass incarceration are easily comforted by images of Black success and achievement conveyed by the media, Alexander notes.


• And the shame associated with criminalization has prevented the Black community from acting in a unified, decisive way to name and challenge the New Jim Crow.


• Alexander ends her book with a What Is To Be Done? chapter that borrows its title – “The Fire This Time” – from James Baldwin’s famous essay collection (The Fire Next Time).


• At the time that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died, Alexander recalls, Dr. King was talking about a “radical restructuring of our society” – not merely tinkering around the edges of systemic injustice.

• Alexander describes an all-out attack on the New Jim Crow as the “unfinished business” of Dr. King’s movement.


• She discusses the key role that faith communities can and should play in examining the role of race and class in U.S. society. And in supporting standards of universal rights and restorative justice.


• Have our religious institutions become “incarcerated” by the existing unjust order? Do faith communities repeat the “law and order” mantra but in voices more hushed than the voices of out-and-out racists?


• Alexander does not believe that eliminating one dimension of the American caste system – even one as powerful as mass incarceration – would end or dissolve all of the caste system.


• She even fears that we might find a way to reduce mass incarceration – for example, by focusing on its unsustainable cost – while completely failing to come to terms with America’s racial caste system.


• But Alexander insists we are all called to join the fight against mass incarceration… even as we recognize and watch for the deeper currents of hate and fear that made the New Jim Crow possible in the first place.


“The Fire This Time”Do you believe it is possible to end or reduce mass incarceration without addressing the caste system that underlies it?

Final Discussion and Q & A

Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration

Session #2Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow – An Overview

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resource guide on mass incarceration session #2 michelle alexander’s the new jim crow – an...

Documents

new jim crow slide

jim crow laws

official jim crow segregation

overview slide

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new deal programs

roosevelts new deal

incarceration system