This paper explores Chris Hayes’ book, “A Colony in a Nation” (2017), a piece of literary work that attempts to analyze and explore the complex relationship between what Hayes refers to as two separate Americas: the Colony and the Nation. Chris Hayes is a liberal political commentator, journalist, author, and host of ‘All In with Chris Hayes,’ a weekday news an opinion show on MSNBC. By looking at the issue from a historical, social, and political perspective, he attempts to explain how the American justice system came to be what it is today. By using examples of racial conflict, incorporated with his own experiences with policing and the court system, Hayes shows how fear, especially fear of ‘the Other’ causes a multitude of problems at the societal level, a concept I have studied in the past. Most importantly, based off of various statistics and research, he makes the argument that inequality in America hasn’t improved as much as people would like to think it has since the 1960s. A Summary & Analysis of “A Colony in a Nation” In the beginning of the book, Hayes states, “There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when …show more content…
It is also the most incarcerated.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 7) He then backs it up with reputable and eye-opening statistics, such as the fact that nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world is an American, even though the U.S. contains only about five percent of the world’s population. According to Hayes, some have argued the total number of Americans under penal supervision rivals the number of Russians in the gulag(s) under Stalin. Chris continues to expose the disparities of punishment and violence between affluent, predominantly white communities and poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, using the cities of Baltimore and Chicago as the basis for his
“...Much of the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of America’s cities–and thousands of lives–it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself’ (Mac Donald). In the book “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” published in the year of 2016, author Heather Mac Donald provides credible evidence to expand on her viewpoint of our country’s current criminal crisis. In addition to “The War on Cops, Mac Donald has written two other books. Her works “Are Cops Racist?”
Ava DuVernay suggests Slavery’s NOT Dead in 13th The recently released Netflix original documentary 13th identifies the issue of race in America and how the government instills fear in the nation in order to provide justice for the people by enforcing a ‘War on Crime.’ This tactic was Nixon’s way of incarcerating blacks during his presidency. Many of the elections beginning with President Truman’s era were a long list of former Presidents that used crime as a platform. Whoever was ‘tougher’ on crime would win the election.
It is an existing theory that our society is constructed via racial dimensions, and that racial equality is a figment of the imagination. This very principle is highlighted in Michelle Alexander’s novel, “The New Jim Crow.” The specific dimensions covered within the text include the unjust aspects of the federal drug policy, and by connection that of mass incarceration as well. Alexander claims that racism is still very prominent in present day society and is direct and frank about the heavy influence of white supremacy. One of the main arguments pushed by Alexander in this book is that mass incarceration is “ a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar
Incarceration rates in the United States are extremely higher than other countries. According to Schlesinger in her article “The Failure of Race Neutral Policies: How Mandatory Terms and Sentencing Enhancements Contribute to Mass Racialized Incarceration” there are, “Currently, one and a half million people are incarcerated in either state or federal prisons” (Schlesinger). This number is very high compared to other countries. A large majority of the people incarcerated are African Americans.
“there were in 2005 some 9 million prisoners in the world, more than two were being held in the United States.” More prisoners are in the United States, some have committed big crimes and some were locked for committing violent. The author describes that more black man are on prisons, some are high school dropouts and some are just working men. The author considers this issue as more than technical issue. The author connects the Nation of Jailers as his personal issue.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ widely acclaimed nonfiction 2015 novel, Between the World and Me, is arguably one of the most quintessential reads about race issues in the United States. For decades, race has always been a tense topic and still brings about upheaval as many differing opinions about the issue of race exists in society. In recent years, new debates have been ignited with recent rises of alleged abuses from the justice system against African Americans. Partially inspired by the rise of these cases and by a meeting with former President Barack Obama in 2013, Coates attempts to tackle the issue of race issues affecting African Americans within his novel. He presents his take on race related issues regarding African Americans in a heart-wrenching
For this semester, we read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. The book talks about how minorities face, especially black men, being treated like second-class citizens by the criminal justice system and this leading to our modern mass incarceration problem. Alexander goes as far as to say “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (2). This is shown by the War on Drugs.
69% of African Americans were convicted. 84% of state attorneys were white and 74% of judges were also white. The Cook County jail is the largest jail in the nation, housing around ten thousand inmates. “The vast majority, 67.3 percent, of those admitted to the jail are young African American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty from Chicago’s South Side and West Side— creating a perversely convenient arrangement whereby the jail is closest to its target population.” (Van Cleve. 19).
We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way
Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.
Michelle Alexander argues in her introduction to the New Jim Crow that the racial caste in America has not ended and that it just has been redesigned. She highlights the ways that the justice system of the United States controls blacks through deliberately imposed legal restrictions. The United States has the leading incarceration rates in the world and most of the individuals involved with the country’s correctional system are African-American men. This essay seeks to discuss the author’s overall argument in the book. The essay will also discuss how the topics in the first three chapters of the book help Alexander develop this argument.
In this paper, I will be critiquing these articles and films in order to evaluate the purpose of these readings and how they have helped further develop race in America. But most importantly, whether the author has achieved its purpose to inform readers about CRT, whiteness, and racial inequality. First article, I will be analyzing is Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Both authors explore Critical Race Theory in detail. As I previously mentioned, CRT is one of the most important developments mainly in the legal studies department.
Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.
In The Meaning of Freedom, activist Angela Davis critiques the plausibility of democracy and collective freedom in the United States. By examining parallels between slavery and the carceral state, Davis contends that the two systems mutually characterize black people as disposable and compels them to incapacitation. Focusing on the two oppressive systems’ reliance on the maintenance of ignorance, Davis discusses how this ignorance is connected to America’s dominant sentiments of capitalism and self-interest, which, altogether, perpetuate cycles of abuse that disproportionately harm communities of color and lower-class peoples. As a result, this propels the creation of social hierarchies which, because it inherently cultivates inequalities, causes America’s classification as a “democracy” to be impossible.
In Chandan Reddy’s Moving Beyond a Freedom with Violence, the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama is manipulated to target black individuals for disrupting the social and cultural progress of the country. The election gave rise to the term “black homophobia,” which became a medium for society to “disavow [its] lack of knowledge of the actual social and political context, social meanings, and worldviews that determine blacks’ (or others’) electoral choices” (Reddy, 184). This concept exposed a widespread neglect by society to attempt to understand and confront the persecution that the black races encounters. The choice to “locate meaning exclusively in the numerical interpretation of aggregate results” (Reddy, 184) further silences the voices and concerns of black individuals and instead, diminishes their votes to a meaningless ballot count. Society’s acceptance of “black homophobia” as a valid and justifiable explanation for the Obama election indicates the power of the media and the formal political process to continually marginalize any differing, non-conventional beliefs or