2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

At first, as others have mentioned, I thought that the reading would be giving crazy ideas that couldn’t possibly true in America today. Sure, not everyone is treated completely equally, but to say that racial prejudice is as bad as it has been seemed to be an exaggeration. This is why I found it interesting that the author actually, in a sense, proves herself to us in the beginning of the reading, explaining that she is a civil rights lawyer, who at first thought it was a ridiculous claim as well. By taking us through her “journey” of discovering how bad the incarceration problem is in America, the author allows the reader to not only trust her more, but also feel more involved in the reading, and want to help solve the problem just as she would like to do. She even says herself in the introduction that “for some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a ‘racial caste system’ may seem like a gross exaggeration (12)”.

I am appalled by the statistics that we are given about how many people are incarcerated in the US, especially African Americans, and how that compares with the crime rates, and with incarceration in other countries. As a whole society, are we really as bad as we were with Jim Crow. Are we even worse? It is frightening to even entertain the idea that we might be better off without prisons. I wonder what kind of effect that would have on our crime rates! However, we definitely need to think about what we can do to solve these problems that exist in our society, which are somewhat hidden and often overlooked.

I remember the first time I had even heard that convicts could not vote anymore: while working the election as a poll worker. Side note of another negative experience while working the election was hearing that the reason Russian translators were not offered, in a fairly heavily populated Russian neighborhood, was because of the current conflict with Russia and once they learned to love America, translators would be provided. This was not an official representative of the Board of Elections but simply a misinformed person who had a position of influence in that context. It baffled me then just as much as now, while reading this passage. I did not realize how institutionalized racism was in the past as mass campaigns began to form relationships between a specific race and drug use. It hurt even more to read how CIA allowed for drugs to be smuggled in, with perfect timing for the Drug War. The worst to read was a city in Texas that attempted to incarcerate 15% of the black population of an entire town on a false testimony. Yet I am sure there are other ways, less publicized and looked in to that are just as horrible and just as jarring to read.

When reading how Native Americans were stigmatized as savages for personal “progress” I could not help but draw a parallel. Were African Americans not similarly stigmatized in the beginning of drug wars and placed in facilities that took away their liberties? This contributed to the author’s point that things have not necessarily changed but just have taken a different form to match the times or to match the goal of “progress.” Progress in the time of colonization involved land and a labor system. Progress after abolishing slavery involved economic stability and white control. They began to pit the lower class poor white people against black people to prevent a uniting situation. All of these facets make me think that more conspiracy theories are true than we would like to believe, especially those that result in one group having more power over another.

It is always a joy to see how economics plays into race, whether it be providing a stable lifestyle away from poverty or reversing power structures but economics was a strong force in defining race and propogating Jim Crow laws, to even our modern day and age. A tool to maintain this order of class, race, and power is mass incarceration among other things. There has been a lot of discussion about revising Food Stamps and other public welfare by Republics and other conservatives, implying that some people do not deserve them. This goes back to the book as in the 1960s it was also an issue of “undeserved” or “deserved” for those same types of welfare programs. What this reading made me realize was just how well and underhandedly history can repeat itself.