Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow

The author Michelle Alexander is very well known as a lawyer that emphasizes civil rights. However, from her piece which is called ‘The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’. She points that there is some legal arrangement which looks like very reliable and suitable but in fact, it took the place of a racial caste system with a another one. The author points out about racial issues that the past and the present have same racial problems. Also, she creates images which will make the audiences to cower but it also makes the readers to believe her persuasion.

From her 2nd page of the book she mentioned that “What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than directly rely on race, we use the criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.” this tells about, as the Jim Crow laws which were legalized on racial segregation were ending and new racial caste system was begin.

In her book, she tells us about a story about Jarvis Cotton. Who was a African American man and was arrested several times. Through the history of USA, African American people have been treated severely discriminated against based on born rights. The author provides an example that how his family rights were being treated wrong in different ways and reasons. For instance, his great grandfather was a slave and was threatened from the KKK (Ku Klux Klan). Also, they were not able to make a ...

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...en, and also Latino people. “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.” (Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X). I would wish that if there is chance of interracial marriage rate and if it was common to the people, there is possibility that it could be no more Jim Crow or any other ways to discriminate and exclude other people on a matter of the color of different skin. I believe that if our societies will never willing to be a colorblind person, and if histories really keep repeats, there would no way to end this racial caste systems that existed in the past and continue to in thesedays.