Analysis Of The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years.

Additionally, the incarceration rate for Black Americans relative to white Americans is higher than it was before the Civil Rights Movement. Professor Michelle Alexander (2012) focuses on the influence of mass incarceration on Black Americans. Alexander (2012) wrote, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, where she uses her experiences as a Civil Rights Lawyer. Alexander (2012) examines the development of institutionalized racism following the war on drugs, and how it has created what she calls a “New Jim Crow Era”. Additionally, Jim Crow laws are known as the former practice of segregating black people in America.

She claims the War on Drugs extends beyond the legal system affecting African American communities in terms of work, housing, welfare, and other necessities (Alexander 138). After prison, felons return to society only to find that many of their rights have been redacted without their knowledge. Often, they will have difficulty acquiring a job; the government denies public housing to all felons without a job and without public housing, many will become homeless (Alexander 56). This argument focuses on the denial of rights to former felons; Alexander believes that this system mimics the Jim Crow laws. Some scholars dispute this argument claiming that today it would be more difficult to create a system in which could fully define the entire race (Forman 58).

The documentary Slavery by Another Name embodies a time in history in which Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the African American as slaves but they were not free from the society. “One of America’s most shameful chapters”, shines light on the injustices of the society in the South that included convict leasing, sharecropping, and peonage. African Americans labored against their own will since the whites were trying to put them back into slavery. The documentary shares with us the testimonies of the descendants, self-made men, slaves, and historians who open up to us an appalling period in America. Socially, economically, and politically the film does well portraying and describing the corrupt American system in the era between the Civil War and World War 2.

Lemann’s Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War gives the reader an account of events, many of which are violent, just after the end of the Civil War. On the surface, Lemann spends great time documenting the violence faced by southern blacks and the life of Adelbert Ames. However, the backdrop is more complex and deals with the changing environment in the United States. Most importantly, the need of the United States needed to integrate four million former slaves into society. Lemann states the purpose of this book is to answer the question “what kinds of lives black people might live in the South now depended on the freed slaves’ organizing abilities and on the reliability of their voting rights” (xi).

She reveals how race plays an important role in the American Justice System and mass incarceration. Although some critics disagree, Alexander persuasively argues that the new caste system in today’s society is the New Jim Crow. Using her experience in the field of civil rights advocacy, she illustrates the truth of racial indifference, the injustice in America’s Criminal Justice System, legal misrepresentation, and violations of the Fourth Amendment. She skillfully crafts a book with remarkable detail and logical claims to create awareness of the New Jim Crow and its effect on mass incarceration.

An American History, stated, “Black sought to make white Americans understand slavery as a concrete reality—the denial of all the essential elements of freedom—not merely as a metaphor for the loss of political self-determination.” African American fought collectively with both men and women against oppression from Caucasians. The practice of slavery for men and women both presented equally sufferings. However, the white planation owners or overseers routinely raped women during this time. Women regularly had their children stripped away from them and sold into slavery. However, ironica... ... middle of paper ... ...families.

Jim Crow, a series of laws put into place after slavery by rich white Americans used in order to continue to subordinate African-Americans has existed for many years and continues to exist today in a different form, mass incarceration. Jim Crow laws when initially implemented were a series of anti-black laws that help segregate blacks from whites and kept blacks in a lower social, political, and economic status. In modern day, the term Jim Crow is used as a way to explain the mass incarcerations of blacks since Jim Crow laws were retracted. Through mass incarceration, blacks are continuously disenfranchised and subordinated by factors such as not being able to obtain housing, stoppage of income, and many other factors. Both generations of Jim Crow have been implemented through legal laws or ways that the government which helps to justify the implementation of this unjust treatment of blacks.

Michelle Alexander asserts that mass incarceration in contemporary American society is the result of targeting African Americans in the “War on Drugs” and serves to maintain a racial caste system similar to the system that existed during pre-Civil War slavery and has been propelled by what Michael Cohen calls “Jim Crow political logic” of Southern

Beginning from more than two and a half centuries, Black Americans have deliberately been mistreated by the United States' government in terms of slavery and policies such as the Jim Crow Laws that ensured the disenfranchisement of them. Through the country's unjust and discriminatory political, economic and social systems, resources and opportunities were overwhelmingly stifled from African Americans. Years of this systematic racism exposes Black Americans to high concentrations of social problems such as poverty. In the book, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (2004) by Roy L. Brooks, the debate of reparation for descendants of the Atlantic Slave Trade is discussed. Brooks makes the argument that a government has