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Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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“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 …show more content…

The novel is a conversation between Alexander and the United States Criminal Justice system, white people, people of color; she uses the passion of an activist to talk to the people and inform them that if they care about the future, humanity, and equality, America needs to start paying attention to the lesser-known injustices and microaggressions to make a change in to end the “racial caste system” in which Americans have been living in for far too long. Alexander enhanced a complex topic by effortlessly recounting it without any elementary language or speech. Her work, while easy to comprehend, may still be hard to read for all of the driven language and the truths that she reveals about America’s past, as well as its present. While the book points out that the similarities of our current Justice system to the old Jim Crow Laws are not as stark, Alexander never points out the differences, which makes her analogy incomplete in its full comparison. This may be done for the effect to take the reader’s attention away from the dissimilarities as the United States commonly only focuses on the differences of how people of color were treated then versus now because it is certainly less extreme. If Alexander is trying to stop people from pointing out that yes, black people are no longer slaves so what’s the problem, then her analogy could still work, it is just not as thorough and inclusive as it could be of all of the sides of the story if the differences are never pointed

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