The New Jim Crow Quotes And Analysis | Gradesaver
Alexander has no illusions that this work will be easy. Rather than unintentional side effects, Alexander convincingly argues that these racial disparities provide the key to understanding the prison boom. Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Paperback: 336 pages. Invaluable... a timely and stunning guide to the labyrinth of propaganda, discrimination, and racist policies masquerading under other names that comprises what we call justice in America. Public defender offices must be funded at the same level as prosecutor's offices. Can't find work in a legal economy anywhere. Describing the rise of Jim Crow in the wake of a growing Populist movement, Alexander notes, History seemed to repeat itself. The New Jim Crow is filled with passages that explain the disparate impacts of the US criminal justice system. As a result, "Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41, 100 in 1980—an increase of 1, 100 percent.
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The New Jim Crow Meaning
Download the interview video (MP4). For me, the new caste system is now as obvious as my own face in the mirror. Alexander is unequivocally critical of Clinton, and even has harsh words for Obama at the end of the book. Yet when I walked out of the election night party, full of hope and enthusiasm, I was immediately reminded of the harsh realities of the New Jim Crow. Does locking up people selling drugs stop the drug trade in a neighborhood? This simple design has helped to produce one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever seen. And then he said something that made me pause: Did you just say you're a drug felon? … When you reach a certain tipping point with incarceration, crime rates rise, because the community itself is being harmed by the higher levels of imprisonment. When you're released from prison in most states, if you're not fortunate enough to have a family who can support you and meet you at the gates and put you up and give you a job, if you're like most people who are released from prison, returning to an impoverished community, you're given maybe a bus ticket, maybe $20 in your pocket, and you return to an impoverished, jobless community. This includes pecuniary bonuses tied directly to the number of annual drug arrests and millions of dollars with of military-grade equipment.
Quotes From The New Jim Crow
The New Jim Crow Review
Once you get that F, you're on fire. In Washington, D. C., our nation's capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Drug abuse and drug addiction is not unique to poor communities of color. SPEAKER 3: That'd be a good one to start. More black men are disenfranchised today as a result of felony disenfranchise[ment] laws. I remember pausing for a moment and scanning the text of the flyer and seeing that a small, apparently radical group was holding a meeting at a church several blocks away.
The New Jim Crow Definition
Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. People will just think you're crazy. They were denied the right to vote in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting the laws that denied the right to vote on the basis of race. The absence of significant constraints on the exercise of police discretion is a key feature of the drug war's design.
"racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. Throughout the book, Alexander examines how colorblindness and the absence race often serves as a quiet, insidious way to embed racist ideology into national systems. Like the "colored" in the years following emancipation, criminals today are deemed a characterless and purposeless people, deserving of our collective scorn and contempt. This time the drug war is the system of control. She calls us to be in solidarity with those our society dehumanizes as beyond our compassion, justice, and human dignity because of the label 'criminal. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold, " this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. Property or cash could be seized based on mere suspicion of illegal drug activity, and the seizure could occur without notice or hearing, upon an ex parte showing of mere probable cause to believe that the property had somehow been "involved" in a crime. Whereas Black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. The media, which sensationalizes drug crime for views and has stereotyped black people as mainly responsible for drug crime. When you step back and actually look at the data on crime and incarceration, you don't see a neat picture of incarceration rates climbing as crime rates are declining. Sometimes it can end up there. There are very few people who are able to work because they've been branded criminals and felons.
Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). You're likely to attend schools that have zero-tolerance policies, perhaps where police officers patrol the halls rather than security guards, where disputes with teachers are treated as criminal infractions, where a schoolyard fight results in your first arrest rather than a meeting with the principal and your parents. A multi-racial, multi-ethnic human rights movement must be [? But they share a common commitment to movement building for racial and social justice that we can move beyond piecemeal policy reform to something that will genuinely shape the foundation of systems of racial and social inequality. "Federal funding has flowed to state and local law enforcement agencies who boost the sheer numbers of drug arrests. Alexander also makes it explicit that the oppressions of the penal system echo the oppressions of the Jim Crow era. "[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Alexander notes a 1995 study that asked participants to close their eyes and picture a drug user. So we've decimated these communities, and we've destroyed all hopes of anything like the American dream.
Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.