★★★★ (4 of 5)

• Full Title: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness
• Author: Michelle Alexander
• Year: 2010
• Pages: 325*
• Genre: Nonfiction, Social Justice, Racism
• Publisher: The New Press
• ISBN 978-1-62097-193-2 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* Page count does not include 2020 preface, original preface, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, or index)

 

Summary

Civil rights activist (and former ACLU attorney) Michelle Alexander makes the case in this book that mass incarceration in the U.S. — as a consequence of the War On Drugs — functions metaphorically as the reincarnated Jim Crow, providing entirely legal means of discrimination, marginalization, and segregation of Black people, all without using any racial language in the law.

My copy was a 10th-anniversary edition with a new preface, in which Alexander acknowledges how much has changed in the U.S. since the book was first published in 2010. Still, much of the book remains relevant — and in fact I recognized a lot of it from the subsequent public dialog and debate that were inspired, at least in part, by this book.

The central idea is that “systems of racialized social control” don’t get defeated in the United States; they simply take new forms, sometimes after an optimistic interregnum. Slavery, for example, ended after the Civil War, but after a relatively brief period of a dozen or so years, was replaced by white supremacist terrorism and then the tapestry of interlocking laws now known as Jim Crow. Then, when the Jim Crow system fell apart under the assault of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, there was another brief respite until the new system could take control. That new system is mass incarceration, brought about almost entirely by the War On Drugs (conceived by Nixon but put into high gear by Reagan — and then even higher gear by Clinton). Though the drugs laws and drug enforcement are entirely “race neutral” on paper and in political speeches, the impact on the ground is far from it.

 

Points For...

Alexander does an amazing job of compressing the history of slavery and Jim Crow into easily digestible pages while still giving enough meat to show the comparisons (and contrasts) with mass incarceration today. She then takes the reader step by step through the beginnings of the War On Drugs and how it came to be waged, rarely in frat houses or suburbia (where illegal drug use is just as prevalant as anywhere else) but in already-segregated poor neighborhoods primarily peopled by Black and Latino people. When the reader begins to doubt some premise or think of some exception, Alexander has already thought of that and soon addresses it.

Though I think this book would have been more eye-opening, more genuinely shocking if I’d read it ten years ago (little of it is new to me now that hundreds of journalists and thousands of civil rights activists have used these exact comparisons in the intervening years), it is still powerful. Perhaps most powerful to me was Chapter 3 (“The Color Of Justice”), which goes step by step through several important Supreme Court decisions that ensured these practices continue: McCleskey v. Kemp (“the Dred Scott decision of our time”), U.S. v. Armstrong, and Purkett v. Elm, among others. The new patchwork of court decisions and precedents, though it is technically race-neutral, effectively bars any challenge to the system as it currently exists.

She shows conclusively how we as a nation have created a “racial undercaste” by locking up millions of young Black men — and then keeping them under state control through probation and parole for years, refusing them employment and voting rights due to permanent felony records, keeping them off juries, and effectively sentencing them to recidivism — all while ignoring that drug possession rates are identical in white neighborhoods and pretending that these young Black men “made the choice” to ruin their lives.

Further, she astutely points out the intrinsic yet hidden harm of “Black exceptionalism” (and tokenism), where society promotes an elite few members of ethnic minorities to positions of visibility and/or power. While it is better than having no representation at all (as in the past), there are a couple of huge downsides: (1) it gives a false impression that the rising tide has lifted all boats, and (2) it makes the task of civil rights activists more difficult because when the school principal, mayor, police officer, or president is Black, not only are Black people more hesitant to speak out against them, but the opposition has an easier time of claiming the system isn’t racially discriminatory. “But we have a Black president”, they said when the Black Lives Matter movement began (which was after the publication of this book, but Alexander foretold it). “But the mayor of Chicago is a liberal black woman!”, conservatives noted gleefully when Chicago police kettled protestors in 2020 (that was also long after this book’s publication, but was exactly what Alexander was talking about). She notes that we should do both: (1) give Black people (and other minorities) better representation and more visibility in the halls of power, but also (2) make sure we haven’t simply promoted a handful of people just so we can pat ourselves on the back about solving racism while leaving most of the undercaste where they have always been.

 

Points Off For...

There was little to dislike about this book, so the following complaints count as nitpicking.

Throughout the book, the author uses “legimate” as a verb (I assume it’s pronounced with the stress on the final syllable); previously I’d only ever seen it used as an adjective (with the stress on the second syllable). It turns out that it can be both a verb and an adjective, though the verb form is far less common. Much more common is the verb legitimize (which can only be a verb). It was distracting to regularly have to check context to determine whether she meant “legitimate” as a verb or adjective, when she could have simply used the verb-only “legitimize”.

Near the end, after piling up more than enough evidence to make her case, Alexander seemingly switched tracks to affirmative action. It didn’t seem logical. Eventually, I think she did tie it into the main topic, but the leap in logic was jarring, to say the least. It took some time before I remembered that, 10 years ago, affirmative action was indeed one of the leading issues of racism-related political discussion (and may still be in some regions). This was less a fault of the author than of the quickly changing times, but it showed the danger of focusing on “what people are talking about now” versus what’s important in the long-term.

 

Conclusion

Unfortunately, Alexander offers little hope at the end (and truly, what hope is there to be offered?) Aside from massive grassroots activism, little can be done. One would like to say vote, but as life has shown us with Clinton and Obama, Democrats are very often just as eager to lock up Black and brown people as are Republicans. She does lay out lists of what actually must change — not just one law or another, but dozens of them — and cautions against setting ourselves up for the next system of racialized control, which will inevitably arise if we don’t correct the root issues.

 

 

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