New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander: Book Review

The New Jim Crow When looking for a book about racial perception I wanted to find a book that looks at racial perception from a different perspective that I had not thought of. This information would need to be new and fresh and be able to open me up to new questions on racial perception. The first stop I made was to Ygnacio Valley Library. Looking around was not very difficult since racism and world conflicts have a shelf dedicated to themselves. I searched through the first couple pages of different books and took a glance at the table of contents.

“The New Jim Crow” Summary “The New Jim Crow” was written by Michelle Alexander based off of her experience working for the ACLU of Oakland in which she saw racial bias in the justice system that constituted people of color second-class citizens; Which is why the comparison had been made to the Jim Crow laws that existed in the nineteenth century. Alexander notes comparisons in white resentment, colorblind language, segregation in neighborhoods, legal discrimination, etc., while the difference are the lack of activism that is shown in response to these injustices. Goes over the entire history of slavery; Documenting the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, and then the civil rights movement to the War on Drugs that Reagan, in 1980, began in order

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a non fiction book written by Michelle Alexander, a well known civil rights lawyer, is a book that every American citizen should read. Alexander’s book cover is of three metal bars and two strong black hands holding them tightly. The book spent multiple weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list and has a foreword written by Cornel West, he is a well known and respected social activist. The book discuss how the new system of oppression for people of color in the United States is mass incarceration. Jim Crow laws were a systematic way to segregate and discriminate against black people.

Michelle Alexander is a writer and an advocate for civil rights. In her book she writes about the advantages of the civil rights movement, which has been the foundation by the mass imprisonment of African Americans during the war on drugs. She talks about the history of how race evolved from slavery to the civil war and from civil war to the civil rights movement. This definitely attracted unwanted attention from conservative politicians. Mass imprisonment was the portal to Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow”.

Michelle alexander states in her book that “1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men” (61). The idea of incarceration, in this situation, mass incarceration is

Civil rights lawyer, advocate, and associate professor of law at Ohio State University, Michelle Alexander, introduce us the term "The New Jim Crow" and the impact it has on the black community. Taking into consideration the arguments in the lecture, we will be discussing themes such as gun violence, the war on drugs and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander describes the social and economic factors that affect gun violence in the United States as a debate that pays little attention to the reasons why some communities are more susceptible to be what she calls "war zones". She argues that it is not the numbers of guns that deliberate the degree of safety of the neighborhood, but the number of good schools, jobs, and opportunities

Over the last couple of years at Dominican University, I have taken numerous courses in sociology and criminal justice. I have learned a great amount about the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander, who is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar, speaks on the assault against on poor and vulnerable people in American society. In the book, The New Jim Crow, Alexander’s work takes on the systemic breakdown of black and poor communities overwhelmed by a huge quantity of unemployment, social disregard, and forceful police surveillance (Alexander, 2010). Alexander’s “subtle analysis shifts our attention from the racial symbol of America’s achievement to the actual substance of America’s shame: the massive use of

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Michelle Alexander in her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" argues that law enforcement officials routinely racially profile minorities to deny them socially, politically, and economically as was accustomed in the Jim Crow era.

In The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, American writer and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander argues that a new racial caste system was born in the United States after the death of Jim Crow. A system that was caused by the war on drugs, which was created in 1971 by President Ronald Reagan, as well as the Fourth Amendment. Alexander conveys her argument that the war on drugs, and the government's disregard for the Fourth Amendment, led to the unfortunate birth of mass incarceration using logical and ethical appeals. In the beginning of the excerpt, Alexander discusses the Terry v. Ohio decision and how it limited the effectiveness of the Fourth Amendment when it comes to drug crimes.

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 2010, author Michelle Alexander wrote the truly insightful book, The New Jim Crow. Throughout the book, Alexander displayed that by targeting African American men through the War on Drugs and racial biases within communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system is still functioning as a modern day system of racial control while hiding behind colorblindness. The New Jim Crow is an eye opening account of how African Americans are still being denied the very rights supposedly won from the Civil Rights Movement and makes one think about the modern day racial stigmas African Americans are facing. Although there has been many reforms to America, stigmatization is a still growing problem within the African American community and the lasting

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American

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.

Race is one the most sensitive and controversial topics of our time. As kids, we were taught that racism has gotten better as times has passed. However, the author, Michelle Alexander, of The New Jim Crow proposes the argument that racism has not gotten better, but the form of racism that we known in textbooks is not the racism we experience today. Michelle Alexander has countless amounts of plausible arguments, but she has failed to be a credible author, since she doesn’t give enough citations or evidence for her argument to convince people who may not have prior agreement with her agreement.. Alexander’s biggest mistake when it came to being a credible author was starting off the book with a countless number of claims without any evidence in her Introduction.

America, the land of the free, but is that true? The book The New Jim Crow raises many questions and forces its readers to reconsider the way we think about our judicial systems. Michelle Alexander brings up 6 main themes that we need to consider, the first one being The New Jim Crow. This is the main theme of the author’s work. She believes that our current American system of mass incarceration due to the rise in drug related arrested, is an attempt to neglect people of color, the same way that the Jim Crow laws had targeted African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.