The New Jim Crow monograph

Michelle Alexander does not assume full credit for the striking title of her book The New Jim Crow, recounting having seen the slogan on a “bright orange poster” in 1998.[footnoteRef:1] Former ACLU attorney turned law professor, Michelle Alexander had always been aware of the need for justice system reform. Alexander worked headed the ACLU Racial Justice Project but it took that bright orange poster to help her draw the connection between drug policy and race-related social justice issues in America. Her initial research revealed that up to three quarters of the prison terms being served for drug offences are Black or Latino, even though the “majority of the country’s illegal drug users and dealers are white.”[footnoteRef:2] Alexander herself is bi-racial, with a white mother and a black father. She experienced discrimination from an early age, forcing her parents out of their community. Her childhood experiences spurned racial awareness, and prompted Alexander to pursue a career as a civil rights attorney. [1: Arnie Cooper, “Throwing Away the Key,” The Sun, February 2011, https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key ] [2: Arnie Cooper, “Throwing Away the Key,” https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key]
After investigating the sinister connection between the War on Drugs and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Alexander started to focus more firmly on mass incarceration. The title The New Jim Crow refers to the fact that the War on Drugs is a racist response to the Civil Rights movement just as the original Jim Crow was a direct response to emancipation. Rhetoric related to the War on Drugs presented a narrative that drove fears deep within the mind of the American public: centering on inner city urban ghettos filled with African Americans using and selling drugs. These narratives represented gross distortions of the truth, just as Jim Crow propaganda would present black males as moral threats to an otherwise innocent white society.
In The New Jim Crow, the author also argues that mass incarceration is a sinister means of social control, and subtle method of subverting anti-discrimination laws and norms. Alexander points out that labeling a person a felon effectively legalizes the types of discrimination that would otherwise be illegal, including “employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service.”[footnoteRef:3] The author calls mass incarceration the means of enforcing a caste system in America. Most remarkably, Alexander claims in The New Jim Crow that the creation of a racial caste system is deliberate, part of a grand scheme machinated by the same demographic that would have supported Jim Crow several generations earlier. Essentially, Jim Crow—even slavery—had been rebranded. The media became the mouthpiece for the moral police, and together with political rhetoric and misleading statistics, the majority of Americans were duped into thinking the War on Drugs was keeping America safe. In fact, responding to drug-related crimes with excessive measures like incarceration and the lifelong penalties associated with being a felon do nothing to improve public health, public safety, or quality of life in the nation. [3: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, New York: The New York Press, 2010, p. 2). ]
Based on the extensive impact the War on Drugs has on American lives, mass incarceration is a civil rights issue, and a human rights issue. Mass incarceration is not at all a response to increased rates of crime; the notion that crime automatically drives incarceration rates is a myth. Alexander notes that “especially black incarceration rates have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.”[footnoteRef:4] In fact, the author traces the genesis of the War on Drugs—and its corresponding effect on punitive incarceration policies—to the Civil Rights movement itself. In the wake of de-segregation and entrenched legal action for civil rights, many poor and working class, largely conservative segments of the white population in America had a new scapegoat. Moreover, the Civil Rights movement itself drove deep into the working class white psyche the idea that social, cultural, and economic capital in America would now be shared among all citizens. Fear of losing power and a superior social status, many white Americans shifted their political alliances from the Democratic Party and its robust social service platform towards an increasingly conservative Republican party.[footnoteRef:5] At the helm of the Republican Party during this exact period was Richard Nixon, who effectively started the War on Drugs. Segregationists and those who deemed civil rights protesters as being disorderly and overly demanding had been longing for a new means of retaining the same social order that had existed for generations. [4: Sarah Childress, “Michelle Alexander: ‘A System of Racial and Social Control.’” PBS Frontline, April 29, 2014, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/] [5: Sarah Childress, “Michelle Alexander,” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/]
Rather than uphold the fundamental tenets of the democracy, including liberty and justice for all, a large number of Americans supported local, state, and federal politicians who participated actively or tacitly in multiple movements that disenfranchised African Americans and created a criminal class. Politicians manufactured a threat, and then provided voters with their solution: mass incarceration. Nixon might have started the War on Drugs, but it was during the Reagan era that drug policy truly reached fruition. As Alexander puts it, “President Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term a “war on drugs,” but it was President Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one.”[footnoteRef:6] The public had been duped. Crime rates were declining, not increasing, and the nation could have capitalized on its social justice gains during the 1960s to mobilize action and reduce racial disparities. Instead, the Reagan years witnessed the birth of a new, vehement brand of political culture that was nothing but thinly veiled racism. The War on Drugs was not even just about domestic politics and angry white people; it was linked with international affairs. As Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, the CIA even admitted that it had allowed guerrilla fighters to smuggle drugs into the United States during the American intervention in Nicaragua.[footnoteRef:7] The War on Drugs has therefore had a profound and deleterious effect on American society. [6: Sarah Childress, “Michelle Alexander,” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/] [7: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, p. 6]
Before reading The New Jim Crow, I was aware that the War on Drugs was both a farce and a race-based policy. Therefore, I did not necessarily change my mind on the topic after reading Alexander’s book. What did change was the degree of credibility afforded to the topic, for Alexander’s pedigree as a civil rights attorney and law professor shows in how the book is substantiated by research. While it may seem like a conspiracy theory, The New Jim Crow is simply an effective reframing of the issues. The three most memorable takeaways from Alexander’s book are all linked to the connection between desegregation, Civil Rights, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration. Also, Alexander shows how frightfully gullible the American public can be, and how easy it is for politicians to manipulate minds with fear. Americans seem unwilling to engage in simple self-reflection, or to bring about a society that reflects the values and ideals of the Constitution.
Since its release, The New Jim Crow has sparked increased dialogue related to mass incarceration. The only way the system can change is to alter the social norms, so that the next generation or two of voters responds at the polls. There will always be those who believe that tough on crime policies work, or are necessary. The focus should be on rational thinkers who can understand that mass incarceration makes no sense, based on historical patterns and social science data. Of course, policy ultimately needs to change but it will only change in response to public attitudes.
Bibliography
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Childress, Sarah. “Michelle Alexander: ‘A System of Racial and Social Control.’” PBS Frontline. April 29, 2014. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/
Cooper, Arnie. “Throwing Away the Key.” February, 2011. The Sun. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key