The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book put into words (with researched evidence) so many things that I've thought and/or felt about the US prison system, the "War on Drugs," and how they're linked. Namely, that both are (and were created to be) discriminatory. Alexander shows with great detail and a clear narrative voice how slavery (legalized exploitation) became Jim Crow (legalized segregation) became mass incarceration (legalized marginalization), and how each institution was built to uphold white supremacy.

Because race can no longer legally be used to justify discrimination, it's not. Now, criminals are discriminated against. Blackness itself is criminalized, and specific policies allow this discrimination to legally continue. The "War on Drugs" is unfairly and overwhelmingly waged on Black men (Alexander notes that Black women and the Latinx population are also targeted, though her book doesn't go into as much detail on that data). These men are engaging in the same crimes that are ignored in middle/upper class and white communities, and once they are "in the system," so to speak, they are marginalized on every front: employment, housing, education, health, civic life.

I got into the work I'm in now specifically to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. I believe that more resources, more mental health professionals, and more positive, caring adults in young people's lives is part of the anti-racist work America needs to do. Less policing (less police), legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, and confronting (and then battling) ugly stereotypes is more of the work. I agree with Alexander when she writes: "As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them."

I'd pair this nonfiction read with Dear Martin (teen fiction) and a viewing of 13TH.

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