...After the collapse of Jim Crow, especially seeing the great success experienced by some African Americans, we start to feel the system of racial caste is officially dead and buried. However, that is just an illusion. Behind the rhetoric of institutionalized equity, our criminal justice system is working as the new Jim Crow preventing blacks from participating in our electoral democracy. While Constitutional amendments guaranteed African Americans "equal protection of the laws" and the right to vote, through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy. During the Reconstruction Era, whites felt threatened and outraged as African Americans were exposed to more social and economic opportunities and started to obtain political power. To turn the table and regain all the black labors they had for free for centuries, southern states drastically increased the penalties for minor offenses. Southern conservatives founded Ku Klux Klan, which fought a terrorist campaign against Reconstruction governments and local leaders, complete with bombings, lynchings, and mob violence. I can never forget those horrible pictures in which some white onlookers were smiling or laughing with the blacks burning or hung on the tree in the background. How sick they had to be to enjoy watching another human being tortured and murdered? Reconstruction...
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...Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow We live in a world today that is racist. Not the type of racist where there are open lynchings and and beatings, but the “frat house” racist as Chris Rock put it. Yet, there are many people today who claim that racism is dead. Well clearly that is not the case. By simply watching the news on TV or reading about it on the internet, you can just get a glimpse of how minorities, particularly African-Americans, are treated in this country. A substantial amount of African-Americans are prohibited from voting, because they are felons, a law that applies in almost every state. With the primaries and the general election coming up, they are not allowed to cast their vote. The incarceration rate for African-Americans is disproportionate to the population. The biggest reason for this is the so-called War on Drugs. Rather than control the usage of illegal drugs, the War controls African-Americans and takes them out of politics. Politics itself is fundamentally racist. Alexander compares the War on Drugs to a caste system. A caste system doesn’t allow those in the very bottom of the pyramid to be successful and that is exactly what the War on Drugs does. Since the birth of slavery to Jim Crow laws to the mass incarceration today, African-Americans have been at a disadvantage from birth. The War on Drugs started in the mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan was President. It essentially gave local law enforcement agencies military-grade machinery to crack down...
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...The New Jim Crow The New Jim Crow is a book that gives a look on how discrimination is still and at some post more prevalent today than it was in the 1850s. Author Michelle Alexander dives into the justice system and explains how a lot of practices and beliefs from slavery times are just labeled differently now. The labeling creates legal discrimination, but most people over look it because it is hidden with words such as “criminals” or “felon” in order to legally enslave and segregate a certain type of people. This discrimination is located in multiple areas of the U.S. government. Alexander goes through the ways of how discrimination is still prevalent in employment, the housing market, education, and basic voting rights. Alexander unveils these discrimination practices by comparing modern government systems to the old Jim Crow laws. Alexander believes that the racial caste system is mostly the same and the only thing that has changed is what we call it now. People of color are mostly the ones incarcerated, so if you use the label criminal you are able to mention people of color without directly mentioning them. Language is everything and how you label it changes the way people view it. Throughout the book her biggest argument and case on this new system is incarceration specifically. Alexander uses a few good points in order to justify her claims. Alexander talks about the “War on Drugs.” Alexander says that the War on Drugs, a policy put into effect through Reagan’s reign...
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...Erin Gorman 11/11/13 Reflection paper 3 The New Jim Crow In the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Alexander puts into perspective that racism still exists in society today. She explains that our criminal justice system is unfairly targeting African American men through mass incarceration with harsh punishment. When released from prison most of these men have less rights then when they entered. This is where Alexander’s idea of the new Jim Crow comes from. She argues that the rights being taken away from African American men are the same rights that they’ve had to fight for, for the past 100 years, and that they are constantly being denied their citizenship. The criminal justice system is using their crimes as an excuse to give harsh punishments and take away rights mirroring the old Jim Crow laws. There are a prominent number of African American men in prison. This is because the police are prejudice against people of color. They may not be doing it consciously but with the stigma that comes with being African American everyone watches them more closely than white men. With the blacks being watched more closely they are going to be getting caught more for their crimes and the whites will get off the hook more. This helps explain why there are so many black men in prison. Also with the stigma that African Americans are more violent and defiant they are more harshly punished for their crimes. If a black man and a white man commit the same crime the black man usually...
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...Chapter 2: The Lockdown Rules of the Game Just Say No Supreme Court Sanctions Legal Misrepresentation The Fourth Amendment isn’t the only rule violated in these situations; most of the American civil liberties have been undermined due to the drug war. The Court has allowed the following: War on Drugs tactics #1: Consent Searches Started in 1960’s but rarely used until the 1970’s -primarily for hostage situations, hijackings, and prison escapes Once arrested, one's chances of ever being truly free of the system of control are slim, often to the vanishing point. Tens of thousands of poor people go to jail every year without ever talking to a lawyer. Approximately 80% of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer. People fear police harassment, retaliation, and abuse−especially poor people of color. Those looking for an attorney often find that unless there are broken bones and no criminal record, private attorney would unlikely be interested in the case. Without significant provision over the authority when exercising police discretion, they can arrest Americans for nonviolent drug charges with relative ease. The Supreme Court lets them do it by, and I quote, “eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police.” Due to this, people are outright saying that there is a “virtual drug exception” in the Bill of Rights. What this means is that the Supreme Court is creating and abusing a section of the Bill...
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...In the book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander—a Ohio State University professor, director of Racial Justice Project at ACLU of Northern California, and director of the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School—was the uncovering research about the system of mass incarceration, which are rules, policies, and laws that helped control the amount of criminals entering and leaving prisons. The author begins with slavery and continues to explain the Jim Crow segregation, which both represent mass incarcerations. Mass incarceration prevents discrimination towards groups of people. For example, the author states, “After the death of slavery, the idea of race lives on.” (26) This specific example...
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...Michelle Alexander, Civil Rights Attorney, details the occurrence of legalized discrimination in her book called "The New Jim Crow." The New Jim Crow indicates that even though slavery has been long abolished, systemized inequalities still exists. There is a strong existence in employment opportunities, educational systems, public assistance, and jury selections across the country. Without taking a closer look, one could easily believe that the prison system is designed to rehabilitate those who have had trouble with the law. However, there is a question as to whether those who are truly rehabilitated have access to equal opportunities when released from correctional facilities. One can further question whether those persons are given fair...
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...The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander I believe to be a wakeup call for the truly “blind” in today’s mass incarceration of black people. Alexander brings light to how the Civil Rights Movement brought upon a new implementation of racial separation. Her understanding of how Mass Incarceration is the opening to a New Jim Crow of how black people in particular lack any real rights of citizenship. Her book seems to overview the typical media covered topics of people being arrested for use and selling of drugs, rulings in the Supreme Court, and struggles of ex-convicts but of course not to the extent that is required. As the media coverage is not about the true facts but rather embellished and or...
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...In chapter five of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” it begins by reminding the readers of Presidents Barrack Obama’s speech urging black men to be better father figures. A question in which he brings up is where are all the true black fathers in today’s society? He then answers they are in the prison system. A prison system that has been filled up with people of color. Schmalleger presents us in his text book “Criminology” with the Social Structure Theories providing us with a better understanding. These theories suggest “negative aspects of social structures such as disorganization within the family, poverty or income inequality within the economic arraignments of society, and disadvantages...
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...On The New Jim Crow In The New Jim Crow, the author blames society for moral failure of the greatest kind in “failing to see the larger problem.” Though, she never actually diagnoses a larger problem-or rather, in attempting to do so, gives a vague diagnosis regularly deflecting, falling into methodical errors, and making unsubstantiated presumptions. The state is both the problem and the solution. Agency is important but not too important. Environmental factors are important but not too important. ‘Racially coded’ language is both racist in its implications and not racist in language. Thus, one could come to any number of conclusions based on these deductions, ever giving truth and falsity to every number of them. First, the author tries to establish that the system is inherently targeting blacks. She does so by citing crime statistics’ supposed inaccuracy and setting a backdrop of racism. The author arrives at the conclusion that mass incarceration would not happen today if we were to recognize racial lines. She defines the main contributing factors to the ghettos as (1) the loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization, (2) the increase of drug circulation and the “war on drugs”, and (3) the perpetual...
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...Corrie Gripenstraw Dr. Jackson American Government November 2, 2015 Book Analysis This paper will present a brief overview of the author and the book, followed by the book’s thesis. It will discuss the major power structures and institutions that are supporting the criminal justice system. This book aims to dispel the common misbelief that the issue of racism is no longer relevant in modern day America. The main idea of The New Jim Crow is that the War on Drugs is, at least in part, racially motivated. It traps African American men in a cycle of poverty. One of the main effects of the War on Drugs is the denial of thousands of African Americans the right to vote. This is eerily similar to the original Jim Crow. The book opens with the case...
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...A book “The New Jim Crow” is written by Michelle Alexander, who is a legal scholar and civil rights litigator. It is published in 2010 by The New Press. The name comes from the old Jim Crow laws, which prevailed in the former federal state of the United States by the 1960s. The book covers the race in the United States related to the social, political and legal phenomenon, and tried the term "The New Jim Crow" applies to African Americans in the contemporary American situation. The new Jim Crow told a truth that is the United States has been reluctant to face. The New Jim Crow has lead to millions of African Americans locked behind bars in the United States, then denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement, and at the same time transferred to a permanent second-class status. Alexander's book is in the New York Times bestseller list for 10 consecutive months, and philosopher Cornel West has called it the "secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first-century America." And led to the reentry centers, community centers, churches, university, and national prisons raise awareness efforts. Author...
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...“Those darn colored folks” When anyone reads a headline, or hear a phrase such as that, they automatically freeze. A phrase like that, can be called “racist slang”. The book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is filled with racial differences. It talks about how not just African Americans, but all brown people are treated differently than those who aren’t people of color. In other words, “The Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness” (Alexander 3). Discrimination should be put to an end because colored people feel out of place, and we all should be equal. The author gave off feeling and emotions that made the reader feel what she felt. That rhetorical device is called pathos. Making the reader feel emotion. Some people when they read about racial discrimination, they tend to get offended no matter what race they are. Discrimination is the sense of being different. Being treated a certain way because you look a certain way. Not everyone that discriminates realize that just because you are “darker” you can still have white people in your family. They don’t look at it like that, they just go off of what they see physically....
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...This article is about how civil rights of criminals is taking away of his actions from the past. Goes on discusses specific issues related to race and the massive African-American men in prison in the United States, however, Alexander notes that discrimination against African-American men is common among minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged population. Alexander's central idea, from which title derives its, is that mass imprisonment, metaphorically, The New Jim Crow. Short Answer Response: [Type your response to short term question here-150-200 WORDS MIN/MAX] It relevant because everyone who is elected in the government is either people voting or government elected select for new position( who people vote for) in the article...
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...The New Jim Crow Dr. Michelle Alexander convincingly debates on her speech at the Riverside Church that America has not ended the racial discrimination yet. In fact, we did not really call it a racial discrimination, but we have used it in a new term as a caste system which is the same term as racial discrimination because we assign people into a different class. According to Dr. Michelle, there are more and more African Americans under correctional control these days than they were enslaved back in 1850. Also, Dr. Michelle briefly discussed about American racial history from the colonies era to the Clinton administration period. She defined it’s as a transformation into the war on drugs instead of the term racial discrimination. In her speech,...
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