This will be a short review, as I cannot do justice to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This brilliant and searing book has given me so much to think about, that I can’t sort it into a neat review at this time. This is a book that I will be thinking about for months, if not years.
The New Jim Crow traces the formation of racial caste in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow to the era of mass incarceration, spurred in the eighties by the War on Drugs. Reagan’s coded attack on “criminals,” and the enormous amount of money provided by the federal government to municipalities to incarcerate nonviolent drug offenders–saddling many with felonies that would affect their ability to be part of society for the rest of their lives–lead to the enormous rise in incarcerating black and brown citizens, particularly Black men. Alexander dives deep into this racialized social control.
What Alexander means by the Age of Color Blindness is the ostensible societal agreement that overt racism is no longer acceptable. That after the Civil Rights Movement and its accompanying legislation, there were barriers in place to prevent the segregation and oppression of Black people. But as Alexander points out, “As white elites struggled to define a new racial order with the understanding that whatever the new order would be, it could not include slavery. Jim Crow eventually replaced slavery, but now it too had died, and it was unclear what might take its place. Barred by law from invoking race explicitly, those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to search for new means of achieving their goals according to the new rules of American democracy.” Therefore, the governmental focus on “law and order” as a means to deal with the “criminal element,” appeared to be neutral, without any mention of communities of color. But in fact, the obsession with controlling crime, even in the face of falling crime rates, even in the face that whites had been statistically found to use drugs and commit crimes in even greater numbers than Black people, became a way to racially control, marginalize, and socially remove Blacks from modern life. As Alexander states, “The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.” The system particularly weaponized crime rhetoric to turn working class and impoverished whites against African Americans, as they saw Black advancement as a threat, despite many class and economic commonalities. Alexander states: “In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.”
The book shares incredible statistics. In 1991, “the number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one fourth of young African American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system.” Alexander notes, “Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population…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.” She goes on: “To put the matter in perspective, consider this: there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.” This astonishing statistic floored me: “More African American adults are under correctional control today–in prison or jail, on probation or parole–than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” Again and again, Alexander shows how mass incarceration and the War on Drugs has created a racial undercaste, and that “once arrested, one’s chances of ever being truly free of the system of control are slim, often to the vanishing point.”
Alexander calls for a revolution in civil rights advocacy, beyond “tinkering and tokenization.” Until we undo systemic, structural racism, and afford dignity to all people, none of us are free. She points out that “seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem.” She makes a case that racial animus is not necessarily required to create an undercaste; racial indifference about what happens to communities of color can be just as destructive.
I guess this review wasn’t that short. But I still only touched on a fraction of the book’s brilliance and insight.