The New Jim Crow reading was incredibly interesting and enlightening. It also calls for a drastic perspective change that is becoming increasingly pertinent to our society. However, many American’s are too trusting in the legal system since it was, after all, designed to protect us, right? This is the story the media has portrayed for far too many decades, and the American public has fallen for the ploy over and over again. However, what if what is designed to protect us IS obviously segmenting and destroying huge percentages of our population. As is the case with the African American male population in large cities. They are becoming quick targets for police searches (with the implementation of stop and frisk) and are paying the consequences after release from the legal system by being completely marginalized from many pivotal rights as an American citizen. So I completely agree with the conjecture that the legal system in this country is a newer and far more well hidden form of slavery. This fact is disturbing, yet the ignorance to the fact is even more disturbing. It’s time more articles and books come out addressing this fact.
R&R
07
Mar 14
Yowza (New Jim Crow)
Even though Professor Braine warned us that this reading could be depressing, I had not adequately braced myself before starting to read it. It’s one thing to have prison abolitionist and anti-racist political opinions on generalized, non-specific grounds; it’s entirely another to see all the reasons for those ideologies clearly laid out. I’m not sure if I want to read the rest of the book–I’m sure it will be both (a) brilliantly articulated and (b) a terrifying dose of reality.
One dominant cultural narrative in particular that Alexander challenges that she doesn’t discuss at length is the “things are gradually improving” trope. In a way, this trope is, I think, one of her main reasons for writing the book, because the misguided notion of a gradually equalizing society comes directly out of collective ignorance of racism in history, racism today, and racism as a systemically oppressive force (not individual prejudice). It seems to me that racism in the very recent past (last 40ish years) is less discussed in schools than racism from the time of the Civil Rights Movement and before. It’s not just racism, either; I learned very little about the very recent past in history classes, which makes no sense to me from a pedagogical perspective (isn’t it more important to know recent political history like the War on Drugs and benign neglect and HIV/AIDS stigma than about the War of 1812?). Anyway, this is all to say that I think the work Michelle Alexander is doing with this book is extraordinarily important, and I applaud her for it. Her book makes me extremely uncomfortable, which I find to be an appropriate emotional response to a comprehensive, oppressive system of social control that targets Black Americans.
06
Mar 14
The New Jim Crow
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.
