What Michelle Alexander presents in chapters 2 and 3 of her book, The New Jim Crow, is brutally, honestly, hard to stomach. The idea that racism exists is not a foreign or sensational concept, unfortunately. But the idea that the people put in place to create, promote and enforce justice are failing spectacularly by creating a racial “undercaste”, as Alexander puts it, is both infuriating and depressing. And the evidence Alexander continues to present in chapter three only makes the picture bleaker. There are implicit as well as explicit biases, she explains, and the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. You may think you are not racist, and you may vehemently oppose racism consciously, but you can, at the same time, STILL have implicit racist biases. What can we do?!
I think there are two important concepts here, one easier to start with than the other. The first, easier (yet elementary) concept, is awareness. At the most basic level, we should be trying to bring our unconscious biases into our conscious minds in order to scrutinize them- we should be aware that there is such thing as implicit racism. By reading material like this book, we call attention to the fact that racism, even in the era of colorblindness, is still an issue.
The other important concept, as alluded to in Alexander’s writing, is media. Of course, portrayal in the media is the root of many, many problems. I am by far not the first and will not be the last to suggest this idea. But if the War on Drugs originally gained momentum because of portrayals in the media of black drug users, such portrayals in the media must be stopped and countered in order for the War on Drugs to die.
