New Jim Crow When Considering the Introduction

New Jim Crow When considering the introduction and chapter three of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, arguably the most important conceptional foundation to remember is the notion of social oppression, and particularly the fact that social oppression can occur with or without the knowledge or intention of the dominant social group.

As Hardiman, Jackson, and Griffin note in their contribution to Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, social oppression that occurs on the institutional level is oftentimes the product of oppressive beliefs and behaviors on the level of the individual and society, making it extremely difficult to pinpoint, and thus challenge, the roots of institutional oppression.

Chapter three of Alexander's book highlights this difficulty in its discussion of the Supreme Court's inability or unwillingness to confront qualitatively obvious discrimination in favor of the near-impossible task of identifying specific, individual cases of racial discrimination. As mentioned above, Hardiman, Jackson, and Griffin discuss three different levels of oppression, but for the most part The New Jim Crow is concerned specifically with institutional oppression in the form of the United States' justice and incarceration system.

Alexander makes this clear in the introduction when she highlights the fact that, contrary to popular belief, the War on Drugs started by Ronald Reagan was not actually begun in response to the "crack epidemic" (Alexander, 2010, p. 5). Instead, it began a few years earlier, and only later did the media popularization of a crack epidemic lead to the disproportionate policies and tactics that resulted in a much higher rate of "black and brown" men being incarcerated for drug crimes (p. 5-6).

Furthermore, Alexander highlights the fact that the crack epidemic, far from being a natural outgrowth of minority communities, was actually the result of the complex interplay between the media and Reagan's contradictory domestic and foreign policies, because even as he was ramping up the War on Drugs, the CIA, under his direction, were financially and militarily supporting South American guerillas directly responsible for smuggling cocaine into the United States (p. 6).

However, as the media and the law worked cooperatively to enshrine the idea of a crack epidemic spreading from within black communities, further institutional oppression became cemented in the United States even as the underlying individual and social roots of this oppression were covered up, both intentionally and unintentionally.

The introduction's example of the spread of crack during the 1980s is only one instance of the way in which institutional oppression reproduces itself while effectively shielding the individuals who actually hold oppressive beliefs, and chapter three of The New Jim Crow focuses on this phenomenon in more detail.

In particular, Alexander demonstrates how a series of Supreme Court decisions have effectively served to enshrine the institutional oppression of black men (as well as other minorities) into the law by perversely pretending to be interested in rooting out instances of individual oppression. That is to say, over the course of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court gradually developed the doctrine that any challenge to the institutional oppression of minorities in the justice system, an oppression that is self-evident when one considers the statistics concerning incarceration rates, cannot be justified.