I have had this book on my iPad forever! Seriously, I think I downloaded it before 13th, the Netflix documentary, was even a development idea. I watched 13th last year, and yet it didn’t spur me to pick this up, but after reading The Hate U Give, this felt like a fitting follow up. I remember being very impressed by 13th, but the nice thing about reading this, is that it really gave me the chance to absorb and contemplate everything, rather than being hit […]
I wish my younger self could have read this book.
First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing. He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power. If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates. Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him. For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]
Another Book That Led Me to Crack Open My Wallet
Like many nonfiction books that I pick up, Becoming Ms. Burton, was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this summer. I had recently read Just Mercy and come off a spring semester of using “mass incarceration” as a model “wicked problem” that needed systems thinking to solve in my Composition 1 class. [Students then picked their own “problem” to investigate and understand better for their research project.] It was interesting then to hear Susan Burton’s story of how she hit rock bottom after the death […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
A Colorblind Society is an Unjust Society
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and law professor at The Ohio State University. Alexander first encountered the idea of a racial caste system when she saw a poster stapled to a telephone pole declaring that “The Drug War is the new Jim Crow.” At the time she thought it was hyperbole. After working in the criminal justice system for several years, her thinking had evolved from the system has a problem with racial bias to believing that mass incarceration is a “well-disguised system […]