Secondary Source Blue Print: The New Jim Crow (introduction)

Citation:

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 10th ed., New Press, 2020.

 “A new consensus must be forged about race and the role of race in defining the basic structure of our society if we hope ever to abolish the new Jim Crow. This new consensus must begin with dialogue, a conversation that fosters a critical consciousness, a key prerequisite to effective social action. This book is an attempt to ensure that the conversation does not end with nervous laughter.” (Alexander 19)

Alexander has found through her career that the prison system in America is being used as a new form of Jim Crow Laws hidden from the media. She hopes that with this novel, she can show the reader how this is a real issue that must be taken seriously. She argues that standard political work will not solve the problem, but instead, the knowledge of the existence of the “New Jim Crow.”

The reader is hooked in with a story by Jarvious Cotton, and how he and his ancestors were all discriminated in different ways. While his forbearers were stripped of rights under slave laws and later Jim Crow, Jarvious was stripped of his rights by going through the racially discriminating court system. She develops her crux that even though racial segregation is banned in law, it is still present with our justice system as a conduit. (1-2)

Alexander then opens with her critical debate where she will primarily be responding to those who believe our justice system is being used to employ racial discrimination as a conspiracy theory. She also explains how she used to be one of these people before she started investigating the US justice system as a lawyer. (2-5)

She continues her argument by discussing 1980s drug wars to provide context as to how this New Jim Crow got off the ground in the first place. She explains the theoretical foundations of how drugs were implanted in impoverished black communities to increase crime rates on purpose to implement racial discrimination through incarceration. She also  adds a line as to how Barak Obama’s presidency does not mark the end of racism in this country, and instead, blinds some people to the racism that still exists.  (5-10)

Alexander provides even more evidence and analysis to her discussion by exposing the rapid increase in incarceration rates over the previous decades. She hopes to shock the readers into understanding the extent to which this crisis existence. She then offers another crux, pointing to how people involved in the discussion search most aspects of our political system for the reasons behind increased in racial inequality, but our prison system is primarily unmentioned. She advocates a push to decrease incarceration rates by halting the construction and investment of new prison systems and juvenile detention centers instead, focusing on disbanding racial inequality in our nation. Lastly, she elevates her conversation by drawing a comparison to other western European incarceration rates to demonstrate how the US is an outlier in the issue as far as the western world is concerned. (10-14)

She continues to define “caste system” a term she will use throughout the book referring to the rights of those post incarceration vs people who have stayed clear of US prisons. She uses the term caste system, because the higher percentage of black and brown prisoners who reenter the world are theoretically left with fewer rights than thus, a synthesis of systemic racism is created. She also defines the term “mass incarceration” which she uses frequently referring only to the US criminal justice system and in no other context. (14-18)

               Alexander concludes her introduction by once again stating that the primary purpose of her book is to normalize the conversation of US mass incarceration of minorities in hopes the conversation will trickle its way into modern politics. She additionally points out that she cannot possibly cover all aspects of the problem in her one book, so instead she will hyperfocus on specific issues from which she has studied carefully and analyzed (19-20)