By: Michelle Alexander
Fifty years ago, James Baldwin accused his country and
his countrymen of destroying hundreds of thousands of black lives. They
“do not know it and do not want to know it,” he wrote. “It is their
innocence which constitutes the crime.”
Today, in the era of mass incarceration and supposed
colorblindness, the white guilt of the Civil Rights era has exhausted
itself, as Barack Obama has observed, and the number of African American
lives we destroy through not knowing now runs in the millions.
The New Jim Crow is for people “who do
not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of
color as a result of mass incarceration.” It’s a book to end not
knowing.
Is this the willful art of not knowing? It is essentially this: The system of mass incarceration that
has resulted in putting one out of every 31 adults behind bars, on
probation or on parole, is merely a redesign of the two race-based
caste systems that parallels a chilling truth.
There are those who persist in believing that African Americans deserve to be
locked up at a higher rate than whites because they commit more crimes.
However, the impact of the discretion our law enforcement agencies
enjoy in deciding where drug laws
are enforced and where they’re not is asinine. Where are illegal drugs more likely
to be found than at a fraternity house? Yet how often are frat houses
subject to early morning police raids?
Once branded a criminal, people enter a parallel social universe in which they are stripped of the rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. The old forms of discrimination—employment and housing discrimination, denial of basic public benefits and the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are perfectly legal again. In some major American cities, more than half of working-age African American men are saddled with criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of a growing under caste—not class, caste—a group of people, defined largely by race, who are relegated to a permanent, second-class status by law.
Once branded a criminal, people enter a parallel social universe in which they are stripped of the rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. The old forms of discrimination—employment and housing discrimination, denial of basic public benefits and the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are perfectly legal again. In some major American cities, more than half of working-age African American men are saddled with criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of a growing under caste—not class, caste—a group of people, defined largely by race, who are relegated to a permanent, second-class status by law.
The question for those who see the racial inequity as merely an unintended
consequence of the War on Drugs is: If the consequences are unintended,
then why aren’t we willing to change the drug laws to eliminate the
inequity?
The New Jim Crow is a call to high-stakes caring across color lines—the kind of revolutionary, grassroots caring that will certainly cost us our innocence and some of our material advantages. But it can also restore the moral force at the heart of the civil rights movement and ensure that we finally listen to—and advocate for—criminals. Read it and be ashamed and angry for the lives and innocence lost.
Read it and start a revolution of caring
TLW
LifePlusUs
The New Jim Crow is a call to high-stakes caring across color lines—the kind of revolutionary, grassroots caring that will certainly cost us our innocence and some of our material advantages. But it can also restore the moral force at the heart of the civil rights movement and ensure that we finally listen to—and advocate for—criminals. Read it and be ashamed and angry for the lives and innocence lost.
Read it and start a revolution of caring
TLW
LifePlusUs
