The New Jim Crow

577 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The role of racial group in social identity construction

In Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she ties the history of the United States with social issues that exist between races in the modern era, including examples of the racial caste system, racial segregation, and white privilege. Although there are many thoughts on how America is a patriotic and free institution, Alexander’s view of the American history shows that white elitists will “rise to the occasion” to retake order and control over those who dare challenge their way of life, ensuring chaos amongst both sides. According to Alexander, the racial caste system in America never ceases but rather adapts. Alexander describes America’s history as a “story of the political and economic underpinnings of the nation’s founding which sheds …show more content…

Alexander notes this and states, “After the passage of the Civil Rights, the public debate shifted focus from segregation to crime” (43). The shift of the public focus was removed from something that directly segregated races to a law and order stance that could work on equality through all US citizens. Programs like law and order, and the civil rights movement may have been created to resist the resurgent caste system and resolve the major social issues regarding race but they never directly targeted those who segregate the rest of society. Alexander even describes the modern society’s effort to resolve the caste system when describing that when “Conservative politicians who embraced this rhetoric purposefully failed to distinguish between the direct action tactics of civil rights activists, violent rebellions in inner cities, and traditional crimes of an economic or violent nature” (43). This concept not only dehumanized those being segregated, but also created abhorrent identities for those who decided on this foundation of how their country provides life to the following generations. One of the first steps needed to take in order to solve a problem is to recognize that there is a problem. America has noticed the segregation in the system as a problem and is now distinguish between positive activism and deliberate prejudice by engaging the media, litigation, and policy. By doing so, Alexander's fear of "The New Jim Crow" and the idea that history repeats itself could be reversed by modern politics making the choice to step into the future with a new sense of freedom that is not limited by racial

Show More
Related

  • Analysis of the New Jim Crow by Professor Michelle Alexander

    761 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...ty and their survival as a group in society because of restraint from the federal government in the ability to litigate their plight in Court. The Author transitions the past and present signatures of Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow with the suggestion that the New Jim Crow, by mass incarceration and racism as a whole, is marginalizes and relegates Blacks to residential, educational and constitutionally endowed service to Country.

    Read More

  • The New Jim Crow Rhetorical Analysis

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    “The New Jim Crow” is an article by Michelle Alexander, published by the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. Michelle is a professor at the Ohio State Moritz college of criminal law as well as a civil rights advocate. Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law is part of the world’s top education system, is accredited by the American Bar Association, and is a long-time member of the American Law association. The goal of “The New Jim Crow” is to inform the public about the issues of race in our country, especially our legal system. The article is written in plain English, so the common person can fully understand it, but it also remains very professional. Throughout the article, Alexander provides factual information about racial issues in our country. She relates them back to the Jim Crow era and explains how the large social problem affects individual lives of people of color all over the country. By doing this, Alexander appeals to the reader’s ethos, logos, and pathos, forming a persuasive essay that shifts the understanding and opinions of all readers.

    Read More

  • The Strange Career of Jim Crow

    1332 Words  | 3 Pages

    C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of the Jim Crow laws. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gives a new insight into the history of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement.

    Read More

  • System Of Mass Incarceration In Alexander's The New Jim Crow

    1619 Words  | 4 Pages

    The first chapter in The New Jim Crow called The Rebirth of Caste, Alexander talks about how even though slavery has passed and there are people still out there to keep our society divided. This was called racial hierarchy is a system of belief that some racial groups were either superior or inferior. The superior where considered the most powerful while this left the inferior at the bottom. As slavery left, the superior used the War on Drugs and mass incarcerations as a way to separate and control blacks once again but through the legal system. Alexander then comes into talking about the history before all this has happened. The beginning of slavery to when Jim Crow laws and practices were implemented but then outlawed because of the Civil Rights Movement. Eventually unjust treatment of blacks through the criminal justice system came to be allowed into society such as mass incarceration.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Jim Crow And Just Mercy

    1126 Words  | 3 Pages

    America is a façade hidden behind its notorious past, with an even more troubling present. The land of the free, home of the brave, and one nation claimed to be united under the presence of an omnipotent power, but is it really? America profits off of the so-called dream that is sold to the hopeful and broken. This nation has been riddled with violence, persecution, hatred, and a false sense of togetherness. 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

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander

    2147 Words  | 5 Pages

    Today, more African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (Alexander 180). Throughout history, there have been multiple racial caste systems in the United States. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander defines a “racial caste” as “a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). Alexander argues that both Jim Crow and slavery functioned as racial caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration functions as a similar caste system, which she labels “The New Jim Crow”. There is now a silent Jim Crow in our nation.

    Read More

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration of the Racial Undercaste

    3340 Words  | 7 Pages

    Throughout the semester, we have discussed many different issues that are currently prevalent in the United States, specifically those related to racial discrimination. One specific issue that I have developed interest and research in is that of institutionalized racism, specifically in the form of mass incarceration, and what kinds of effects mass incarceration has on a community. In this paper, I will briefly examine a range of issues surrounding the mass incarceration of black and Latino males, the development of a racial undercaste because of rising incarceration rates, women and children’s involvement and roles they attain in the era of mass incarceration, and the economic importance that the prison system has due to its development.

    Read More

  • The Marrow of Tradition

    1474 Words  | 3 Pages

    As the United States developed and grew, upward mobility was central to the American dream. It was the unstated promise that no matter where you started, you had the chance to grow and proceed beyond your initial starting point. In the years following the Civil War, the promise began to fade. People of all races strived to gain the representation, acknowledgement and place in this society. To their great devastation, this hope quickly dwindled. Social rules were set out by the white folk, and nobody could rise above their social standing unless they were seen fit to be part of the white race. The social group to be impacted the most by this “social rule” was the African Americans. Black folk and those who were sympathetic to the idea of equal rights to blacks were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. (Burton, 1998) The turning point in North Carolina politics was the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. It was a very bold and outrageous statement from the white supremacists to the black folk. The Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from the local government and destroyed the neighborhood by driving out the African Americans and turning it from a black-majority to a white-majority city. (Class Discussion 10/3/13) This event developed the idea that even though an African American could climb a ladder to becoming somebody in his or her city, he or she will never become completely autonomous in this nation. Charles W. Chesnutt discusses the issue of social mobility in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. Olivia Carteret, the wife of a white supremacist is also a half-sister to a Creole woman, Janet Miller. As the plot develops, we are able to see how the social standing of each woman impacts her everyday life, and how each woman is ...

    Read More

  • Liberty And Justice In Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow Laws

    1297 Words  | 3 Pages

    She first presented her insights with an elaborate historical background of how, a century later, the Jim Crow Laws are still present in our society. Alexander introduces us to the Cotton family who were denied their right to participate in the American electoral democracy on not only one or two occasion, but on several occasions. Alexander suggests that this denial is a generational wrong by the government, as she highlights the injustices that the Cotton family encountered as black individuals born in the United States. Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote because he was a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was highly intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan. His father was subjected to a literacy test that prevented him from voting. Now, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many other black men in the United States, has been labeled as a felon and is on parole (Alexander 1). According to Alexander, once one is given the title of a “felon” the old forms of discrimination arise: unemployment, housing, education, public services and denial of the right to vote the list goes on and on (Alexander

    Read More

  • disguised discrimination

    1518 Words  | 4 Pages

    Alexander effectively reviewed and explained the racial caste that our country instilled on African Americans in the past, through purposeful discrimination. Even prior to the Jim Crow laws, Black men and women had very few if any rights to employment, own land, or equal opportunities in general. Preceding these however was a far worse form of dehumanization, it was the atrocity that was slavery. This persistently prejudice judicial system no doubt impressed an ongoing lie of racial inferiority, which was difficult to overcome. While I was unsure of the meaning of this “Racial Caste system” Alexander was referring to, it was later explained as a social structure that intentionally divides and belittles individuals due to their ethnicity.

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration: A New Age of Colorblindness

    554 Words  | 2 Pages

    I agree with the sociological perspective presented and identified by the group for the social artifact, which was the conflict perspective. The conflict perspective views this problem as a definition to a person’s social status because of how the person is viewed and treated by law enforcement. It explains that an act is not naturally a criminal act, it is society that defines it that way. Michelle Alexander talks about her new book called “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”. A very evident social problem that the social artifact faces is the war on drugs currently in our society because it is exclusively fought about in poor communities. This has branded African Americans and has

    Read More

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

    1198 Words  | 3 Pages

    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. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).

    Read More

  • Analysis of Black Awakening by Robert L. Allen

    1871 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Black Awakening in Capitalist America”, Robert Allen’s critical analysis of the structure of the U.S.’s capitalist system, and his views of the manner in which it exploits and feeds on the cultures, societies, and economies of less influential peoples to satiate its ever growing series of needs and base desires. From a rhetorical analysis perspective, Allen describes and supports the evidence he sees for the theory of neocolonialism, and what he sees as the black people’s place within an imperial society where the power of white influence reigns supreme. Placing the gains and losses of the black people under his magnifying glass, Allen describes how he sees the ongoing condition of black people as an inevitable occurrence in the spinning cogs of the capitalist machine.

    Read More

  • Evolution of Racial and Ethnic Dynamics in the US

    1515 Words  | 4 Pages

    The article, “RACE AND ETHNICITY- CHANGING SYMBOL IS OF DOMINANCE AND HIERARCHY IN THE UNITED STATES” by Karen I. Blu is an exceptional work that clearly expounds on the racial and ethnic groups especially in America. Racial and ethnic groupings are gradually becoming popular in the public arena, in which people are shifting their focus on classifying other people on the basis of racial groupings to rather classifying them on the basis of ethnicity. Moreover, race grouping is slowly submerging into ethnic grouping with Black activism being the role player in this (Blu, 1979). The following is a summary of the aforementioned article in how it relates to racial and ethnic groups and response regarding its views.

    Read More

  • American Race Relations

    724 Words  | 2 Pages

    Though each article has its differences in style, perspective, and concerns, all three reinforce the idea that race relations in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the South, were in dire need of work. Whether the issue was how African Americans were viewed, treated, or thought of in American life, the main point that seems to come through in each author’s work is that on the whole, things needed to change from the prejudiced and stereotypical behaviors of southern America and, to a greater extent, the country as a whole. Race relations were not a high point in history, and it is a shame things did not get better sooner than they did. Du Bois, Wright, and Myrdal showed the state of the world after the Reconstruction era and before the Civil Rights movement, which was harsh and controversial yet had a big impact on American life and American history.

    Read More

More about The New Jim Crow

Open Document