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The use of, possession of, or selling drugs is illegal but it has been systematically created that laws make it impossible to. She claims that the criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a way to discriminate and repress the black man. The labeling perspective comes into play with Michelle's claim because African American men have been labeled to be the race that's attached to deviant acts. Because black men are attached to the deviant act of drugs, the criminal justice system created laws which make it where there is a mandatory minimum of time that has to be served for the smallest amount of drugs. Once he serves time in a correctional fac... ... middle of paper ... ...nterviewees explained how much he loved one of the drug dealers who introduced him to the hustle.

She claims that politicians like Nixon and Reagan first used racially coded language to sway voters which would lead to the drug war (Alexander 47). Alexander argues that the War on Drugs ignited this trend despite many people disputing her claim (102), blaming it on the decade on rampant violent crime. Her most venomous argument focuses on the racial bias in the legal system at all levels; she claims that the discretion of law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges allow for the mass incarceration of African Americans. The mass incarceration paired with racial bias and discretion allow for a segregation that affects impoverished African Americans most drastically by locking them in ghettos or prisons (Alexander 122). The most profound effect of this system is the metaphorical segregation of African Americans.

His character’s name was Jim Crow. At the end of the 1800’s, several anti-black laws were nicknamed, “the Jim Crow laws”. These laws stated that black and white Americans must be separated in every aspect of life. Ac-cording these laws, it was legal for African Americans to be treated worse than everyone else. The Jim Crow laws were unfair to the African Americans because they replaced slavery with racial segregation, little attention was given to the groups against these laws, and they received unjust punishments.

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.

Rather than using a model of urban poverty that blame the poor for their poverty, Black instead focuses, through ethnography, on the social forces that affect the individual lives of three urban Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy. As viewed in the book, many targets for the prison system are poor African American and Latino men. People that come from poor neighborhoods are at a higher risks of being incarcerated. There have been different outcomes for different racial and gender groups in sentencing and convicting criminals in the United States criminal justice system. Experts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to many of these inequalities.

There is exists discernment in voting rights, employment, education and housing when it comes to privileges. In the, ‘the new Jim crow’ mass incarceration has been described to serve the same function as the post civil war Jim crow laws and pre civil war slavery. (Michelle 16) This essay would defend Michelle Alexander’s argument that mass incarcerations represent the ‘new Jim crow.’ From the study, Michelle Alexander’s argument is true and correct that the mass incarcerations are just a representation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow has just been redesigned as the blacks have continued to be mistreated and denied some of the rights and privileges that their counterparts enjoy. There is discernment against the African Americans towards different privileges which are essential to their lives.

(210) The courts were striving to keep blacks at a level similar to slave laws. In this state of chaos it is no wonder why black crime was steadily rising. Many whites tried to explain black crime by stating that black people were inherently evil and violent, that they were biologically inferior. Those statements were obviously incorrect as it is clear why black crime was growing during the urban transformation. Blacks were subject to the culture that slavery instilled in them.

Racism was not the beginning, it was the ending result of a power struggle between those who wanted control and those who had it. The systematic enslavement and dehumanization of blacks resulted in the concept of a racial caste division, creating the idea of us vs. them (Wacquant, 2002). The Jim Crow laws, prisons, and the creation of ghettos

In an essay entitled Black Americans: Prisoners of Socio-economic Cycles, the author states that “Those first Africans were prisoners of a socio-economic system which by design was purposely incapable of rendering justice and therefore, equal opportunity to Africans as well as other minorities (Ansar 2).” During the years of oppression, in which blacks still experienced limited freedom within the law, many artists spoke against this discrimination through their literature. One such artist, Langston Hughes... ... middle of paper ... ...rgues: “law enforcement depends on the exploitation of race and class divisions and that’s injust (Cole 37).” Lobhai 7 Therefore, the questions remain: how can we change the unjust ways of the system? Will racism ever end? The only solution that may still provide hope for eliminating racism is by instill values of equality amongst our children. In the song from “South Pacific” it states: “You have to be taught to hate and fear, You have to be taught from year to year, it has to be drummed in your dear little ear.” Therefore, we should instill ideas promoting equality and admiration of the differences among the human race instead of fear and or hate within our children.

Disguised Discrimination In Michelle Alexander’s speech on her book The New Jim Crow, she vividly describes the past forms of blatant oppression of minority groups, especially Latino, and even more so, African American men. Such political systems such as slavery and Jim Crow Laws, were discussed as government intended repression of African Americans. The War on Drugs is then blamed for unfairly targeting minorities, which results in staggering rates of Black and Hispanic arrests. She later relates the past direct forms of discrimination to today’s indirect forms, and informs her audience on how our present political system has a very similar effect to the Jim Crow laws. I feel she effectively and convincingly states her argument using clear and concise language.