As a prominent civil rights lawyer and activist, Alexander draws on her personal experiences and her deep knowledge of United States law to argue that our current legal system is unfairly biased against African Americanseven more so than other minorities. Such a system disadvantaged obviously Black children and ultimately served to enforce white supremacist theories that Blacks were intellectually inferior.Southern Democratic governments sought not only to limit Black academic pursuits, but also to curb political participation. Many African Americans were arrested on trumped up or even nonexistent charges and refused due process. There are potentially controversial arguments around the intent and degree of conscious/subconscious bias. Chapter 5. The system becomes institutionalized and pervasive, as stakeholders pursue their own incentives and rationalize their behavior. [...] Next day found the song of Jim Crow, in one style of delivery or another, on everybody's tongue. The Study Guide and Call to Action spans the entirety of The New Jim Crow, engaging the critical questions of how we managed to create, nearly overnight, a penal system unprecedented in world history, and how that system actually functions — as opposed to the way it is advertised.

Unsurprisingly, disgruntled slave owners and white politicians in the South wanted to maintain the status quo after the Civil War. If you’ve ever watched “Les Mis,” you know what we’re talking about. White elites committed to racial hierarchy worry about a threat to the social order. Jim Crow institutions officially fell in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement effectively destroyed many of the legal, political, and social structures that hindered African-American progress for so long. As a prominent civil rights lawyer and activist, Alexander draws on her personal experiences and her deep knowledge of United States law to argue that our current legal system is unfairly biased against African Americans—even more so than other minorities. Advocates are loath to petition on behalf of criminals. Uses the War on Drugs to arrest large numbers of black men, through strong financial incentives and legal protection of discretion that may be racially biased. So, in other words, there are no slaves today – but there are prisoners. Higher rates of searching black people leads police to find more drugs on them by absolute count, which reinforces higher search rates and higher absolute counts. Well, add a little adjective such as “Overt” before that sentence, and Michelle Alexander may just agree. No other Jim Crow code or law extended so widely beyond the borders of the American South. segregation remained in effect, persisting for ten years or so until schools in the South were finally forced to desegregate. Before writing her book, Alexander was the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU. Obviously this is aggravated by the greater rate of arrests of colored people. The point is, they themselves don’t know it: just like everybody, they are biased. Positive feedback loops are incredibly powerful and can lead to lock-in of a situation like the New Jim Crow. And by they – we have no one specific in mind: the government, the politicians, the conservatives, the alt-right parties, the uninformed….
This was not an easy task. In light of what we've learned about the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power struggles that followed, it may be difficult to comprehend the fact that most Black Southerners, prior to the 1950s, chose to yield to the obstacles that prevented them from exercising their rights. We doubt that you’ve ever thought about it this way. Tough-on-crime “law and order” policies first implemented by Nixon and greatly intensified by Reagan during the War on Drugs have resulted in the devastation of the black communities on par with the pre-Civil War era. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow Chapter Summary. In response, white Southerners devised a plan to quarantine and control them. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. And we should note that although thousands of poor and illiterate whites also lost their right to vote under these rules, officials often allowed them to skip voting tests altogether.African Americans continued to cast ballots in large numbers in many Southern counties until the 1890s, and some even continued to hold office, with a few maintaining seats in Congress until the turn of the century. Homicides account for 0.4% of the past decade’s growth in prisoner population, compared to 61% attributable to drug offenders. Ultimately, white authority all but eliminated Black suffrage in the South, so much so that by 1940, less that 5% of eligible Black Southerners were registered at the polls. The younger generation of Black Southerners, many of them more educated and less fearful of white authority, rejected accommodation, even as a strategy to earn new rights. Through a combination of police searches and arrests, and legal permissions loosening the requirements for such arrests. Even though it’s unjust and racially prejudiced, in that it imprisons African Americans for drug-related crimes for life, turning a blind eye to the fact that whites buy and sell drugs almost at the same rate. A bevy of changes made it easier to arrest and convict people for drug offenses.

And, as Darryl Pickney writes, even though she “is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, [The New Jim Crow] is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing.”. He persuaded a Black steamboat baggage carrier to accompany him to the theater. Who is Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow? Those most likely to violate white Southern customs were the children and grandchildren of former slaves, the newest generation since the war and the first to have no recollection of slavery and its horrors. Even an accurate tally of deaths can't adequately explain just how treacherous a world this was for Black Southerners and, fundamentally, all those—including white citizens defiant of segregation laws—who threatened white supremacy in the South. Since 1980, the growth in number of arrests for black Americans has been concentrated in drug crimes - arrests for property and violent crimes have decreased. These acts, however, were all too often sporadic and unorganized, and they resulted, without exception, in greater white violence. Police target black drug users and not white drug users partially because of the decreased political risk.

The intimidation, harassment, terrorism, and violence they endured betrayed any expectations for meaningful change and convinced them that the "American Dream" didn't apply to them. Racism is built into the constitution - slaves are defined as ⅗ of a man. Seeking new opportunities in the West, Rice accepted work as a stage carpenter in Louisville, Kentucky, an adjunct performer for an acting troupe in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a freelance prop man for a dilapidated playhouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.While in preparation for a stage show in Pittsburgh, Rice concocted a plan to win the notoriety he so desperately desired. They think, “the criminal justice system is now colorblind, so any correlation of arrests with race must reflect intrinsic behavior traits, not systematic racial bias.”. Many of the ways in which African-American men and women responded to the Jim Crow system can't be described as explicitly rebellious. Those African Americans who managed to register anyway were victimized by racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. And that the justice system is about as good as we can make it.
Federalism protects states’ rights to slavery. Rigid financial incentives are in place to perpetuate the system.

Stripped of political power and civil rights and faced each day with the threat of violence, many chose to carefully navigate through the complex maze of rules and restrictions in order to ensure a future for themselves and their families. Blacks are no more likely than whites to sell and consume drugs (albeit according to survey data). In particular, the older generation—those who'd been born into slavery—recognized the fatal consequences that could come from asking questions, pursuing higher education, or seeking economic advancement.But even through acts of accommodation, many tested the limits of segregation and discovered ways to undermine the system without appearing to do so. Radical Reconstruction had taught whites that the Black vote was intimately linked to that population's quest for equal rights. Is There Anything We Can Do? These were likely well-reasoned laws passed to disincentivize drug use, but they have a crippling effect on the ability of the subjugated to buck the system. During the performance, Rice secretly led the man through a private entrance and into the dressing room backstage. Boost your life and career with the best book summaries. Taking cues from Northern segregation policies enacted prior to the Civil War, Southern legislators dictated where Black citizens would eat, drink, sit, swim, walk, work, play, learn, live, be hospitalized, and be buried. Maybe African Americans are just more prone to crimes. Once in the system, African American prisoners were farmed out to former slave owners and put to work on the same plantations as before. It landed on bestseller lists, was discussed in the media endlessly, made Alexander an activist-scholar hero, and led to many subsequent handbooks and publications on how to bring its prescriptions for a … Arguing that average people should know not to give consent for suspicionless police searches, thus giving . Black people were forced to attend separate schools, pray at separate churches, sit at the back of the bus, and even drink from different water fountains. the majority of them are African Americans. As a result of... Chapter 1: "The Rebirth of Caste" Summary, Chapter 3: "The Color of Justice" Summary. One way they did this was by funneling African Americans into the penal system and labeling them convicts. 30-50% of people under parole in SF/LA were homeless.

They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago. The young actor, nicknamed "Daddy," performed in theaters throughout New York for much of the 1820s, but remained frustrated by his small roles and jealous of his colleagues who enjoyed greater celebrity. The colonies had to deal with the contradiction between the ideals of freedom in the colonies vs slavery and the extermination of American Indians.

These implicit boundaries, unspoken social codes and customs underwrote all official legislation and served to reinforce racial hierarchies. CENJC_Study_Guide__LW__(1).pdf And we went into paradox overdrive mode: black people were punished for life for buying/selling marijuana, and murderers escaped unscathed.

Michelle Alexander doesn’t claim that she has a solution to the problem – that’s not the point of the book. Drug offenses account for ⅔ of the rise in federal inmates and ½ of rise in state inmates between 1985 and 2000. For instance, grandmothers can be evicted if their grandchildren smoke weed in the parking lot.