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New Jim Crow Discrimination

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“The New Jim Crow offers a devastating account of a legal system doing its job perfectly well. We have simply replaced one caste system with another one.”
— Forbes Magazine
“The New Jim Crow” sheds light on the racial amplitude within the war on drugs. It contends that federal drug policies unfairly target minorities, i.e. people of color. Due to this discrimination, people of color, black men particularly, are kept in a never ending cycle of living in poverty or behind bars. This discrimination relates back to the Jim Crow laws that discriminated against people of color from the 1870s to the 1950s. It feels as if each time some stride is made for equality amongst the races, there is backlash towards the communities of color due to the white …show more content…

“The New Jim Crow” disproves claims that racism is dead. Many white Americans believe that full equality has been reached, but they would have a rude awakening realizing that many African Americans cannot vote due to being a convicted felon. One in three young, black men are incarcerated in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans have been in prison due to drug convictions that have arose from the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was introduced by President Reagan as a way to combat the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, but it is seen by people of color as a genocide against black people. The War on Drugs is racist in both its application and design. Alexander studies the system of mass incarceration which is used to control criminals both in and out of prison. Mass incarceration utilizes the War on Drugs as a strategy to control people of color and remove them from the political process. Alexander argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration constitutes a “rebirth of caste” in America. Just like slavery and Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration places people of color into discriminatory positions within our society for …show more content…

Alexander spends so much time trying to convince the reader how closely the prison system now relates to the old Jim Crow, but forgets to mention the dissimilarities they both have which, in my opinion, minimizes how rough people of color still have it with how progressive our society should be. Back then I feel that the Jim Crow laws were still absurdly wrong and demeaning, but people were so backwards and did not have a lot of knowledge or understanding of new cultures, but today, we do and yet people still experience this type of discrimination! Even if every drug offender was released tomorrow, the United States would still have the largest prison population. I think this raises the question of how Alexander should have looked into violent crime offenders as well as drug offenders to see how no matter what type of crime it is, the system discriminates against people of color. We can blame the War on Drugs all day long, but I really feel it is just all the institutionalized racism everywhere, not just in the drug

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