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

First hearing the claim of the author that mass discrimination exists through the criminal justice system, I’m sure, surprises many readers. Enough that the author has to spend many words in the introduction explaining her narrative on how she came about her conclusion. It would draw in any reader that is surprised with what is being presented. It worked for me as well.

Alexander spends the first chapter comparing the implementation of three important institutions: slavery, Jim Crow laws, and mass incarceration aka New Jim Crow laws. An important point that came up was that initially, racism in America grew as a byproduct of plantation owners seeking profit and security. Plantation owners wanted workers that wouldn’t fight back. Native Americans as always been threatening while white indentured workers have revolted in the past. Enslaving whites also would prevent immigrants from wanting to come to the new colonies. The solution was to bring in Africans that spoke a variety of different languages, thus preventing any unity. By fabricating the subhuman status of blacks, lower class whites were satisfied with not being part the lowest rung of society. According to Alexander, the country never recovered from this racism and always found new and better ways to maintain the status quo that would be harder to break.

With the newest form of racial discrimination, mass incarceration, the author is blaming previous presidents for making matters worse and by maintaining stronger laws against “criminals.” However, it is a matter of dealing with symptoms instead of battling the cause of such a high rates of incarceration. Often, dealing with symptoms simply wins more votes. The real solution at this point would involve somehow lowering drug abuse rates while lessening the punishment for those caught. More jobs wouldn’t hurt; less time for trafficking.

            In the introduction of the New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander draws the parallels between the era of racial prejudice and the current system of discrimination against criminals. All of the sectors of living in which Jim Crow Laws had made it perfectly legal to discriminate against African Americans, are now the same rights denied to labeled felons. Perhaps Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the War on Drugs, the emersion of crack cocaine, alongside the saturation media with images of black crack whores, dealers, and babies seem like the perfect ingredients for a conspiracy theory, what remains factual is the resulting drastic increase in arrests and convictions for drug charges.

The conspiracy lived on within music in the recent years after the Ronald Reagan Era.

“Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares? One less hungry mouth on the welfare, First ship ’em dope and let ’em deal to brothers.” -2pac

 

            Given the statistic that one in three young African American men are either in prison, on probation, or parole doesn’t come off as a surprise as a New Yorker.  In this city we tend to identify a neighborhood with heavier police patrolling as a neighborhood with a higher crime rate rather than a safer neighborhood; but what the New Jim Crow made me reconsider is if this association is just a result of the racial caste system Alexander describes. Since these neighborhoods tend to be mainly minority ethnic populations, it is easy to see the prevalence of a racial caste system.

            The Rebirth of Caste applies a timeline from the system of indentured servitude to the transition of the enslavement of people shipped directly from Africa (since slaves from the West Indies were more likely to know English and identify with rebellion causes, e.g. Bacon’s rebellion), to the black codes, brief Reconstruction era, Jim Crow Era, to mass incarceration. Political language has adopted using coded racial terms, however, the blunt discrimination remains. Even if recent laws were written to satisfy our “colorblind” society and claim to be race-neutral, still 90% of prisoners arrested for drug offenses are black or Latino. Ultimately, the New Jim Crow forces us to stop and think about the aspect of our justice system that we all just admit to and shrug off; that sometimes the justice system can be distorted; that racial profiling exists; even with police brutality, stop and frisk, we just accept it as a facet of the system, even if it angers most of us. The New Jim Crow offers the historical explanation of its installation and sheds a new light of knowledge on a part of our society that I previously blindly accepted as just “how it is.”