The New Jim Crow

By Michelle Alexander. 2020

The subject that I intend to explore today is one that most Americans seem content to ignore. Conversations and debates about race-much less racial casteare frequently dismissed as yesterday's news, not relevant to the current era. Media pundits and more than a few politicians insist that we, as a nation, have finally "moved beyond race." We have entered into the era of "post-racialism," it is said, the promised land of colorblindness. Not just in America, but around the world, President Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America. This triumphant notion of post-racialism is, in my view, nothing more than fiction-a type of Orwellian doublespeak made no less sinister by virtue of the fact that the people saying it may actually believe it. Racial caste is not dead; it is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States amounts to a new caste system-one specifically tailored to the political, economic, and social challenges of our time. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. I am well aware that this kind of claim may be hard for many people to swallow. Particularly if you, yourself, have never spent time in prison or been labeled a felon, the claim may seem downright absurd. I, myself, rejected the notion that something akin to a racial caste system could be functioning in the United States more than a decade ago-something that I now deeply regret. I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system in the mid-1990s when I was rushing to catch the bus in Oakland, California and a bright orange poster caught my eye. It screamed in large bold print: THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW. I recall pausing for a moment and skimming the text of the flyer. A radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, the drug war, and the expansion of America's prison system. The meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed and muttered to myself something like, "Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn't help to make such absurd comparisons. People will just think you're crazy." I then crossed the street and hopped on the

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Citations in the corpus

Prediction-Based Decisions and Fairness: A Catalogue of Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions (2018, background): “using arrests as a measure of crime can introduce statistical bias from measurement error that is differential by race because of a racist policing system [1, 85].”
Black Girls and School Discipline: The Complexities of Being Overrepresented and Understudied (2019, background): “It is important to contextualize punitive school discipline practices and the School-to-Prison Pipeline as part of this larger carceral state, where the mass criminalization and imprisonment of bodies different from the norm is the goal (Alexander, 2012).”
The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves: Racial Disparities and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Justice System (2018, background): “To some people, the disparities in police stops and incarceration are so extreme they can be interpreted only as signs of systemic racial bias (e.g., Alexander, 2010).”
Seeing Race in the Research on Youth Trauma and Education: A Critical Review (2020, background): “It is important to note that this study not only minimizes how structural racism has operated within policing practices (M. Alexander, 2010) but also suggests that race is inconsequential.”
“That’s My Number One Fear in Life. It’s the Police”: Examining Young Black Men’s Exposures to Trauma and Loss Resulting From Police Violence and Police Killings (2019, methodology): “In much the same way that lynching with impunity asserted social control over Black Americans by perpetuating a fear of racial violence and death (Alexander, 2010; Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), racially motivated police brutality trauma (Bryant-Davis et al.”
Belief in Redeemability and Punitive Public Opinion: “Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal” Revisited (2020, methodology): “Given that race and racial bias are integral to public policy and public opinion (Alexander, 2010; Pager, 2007; Tonry, 2011; Unnever et al., 2008), any design must incorporate race and ethnicity into the evaluations respondents might make. A key issue is whether the public will embrace the possibili”
Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice (2018, background): “with broad powers (Butler, 2017). The War on Drugs, often identified as a primary cause of mass incarceration, emerged out of an explicit agenda by the Nixon administration to target people of color (Alexander, 2012). As Nixon’s special counsel John Ehrlichman explained years later, “We knew we coul”
Counterfactual risk assessments, evaluation, and fairness (2019, background): “In settings such as child welfare screening and criminal justice, research suggests that even when controlling for the true risk, certain races are more likely to receive treatment [2, 12, 33].”
Families coming together in prison: An examination of visitation encounters (2016, background): “Specifically, an influential body of work has documented how imprisonment contributes to the long-term disenfranchisement of former prisoners and the overall deterioration of families and communities (Alexander, 2010; Clear, 2007).”
Equity, inclusion, and antiblackness in mathematics education (2019, background): “Further, Jim Crow racism was a corrective response to Reconstruction.”
Herd Invisibility: The Psychology of Racial Privilege (2018, background): “…settlers and newer European immigrants continue to benefit from racist policies and practices, both past and present: Black/White disparities persist in the domains of health, housing, education, employment, finances, and criminal justice, to name a few (e.g., Alexander, 2012; Katznelson, 2005).”
The false promise of risk assessments: epistemic reform and the limits of fairness (2020, background): “Discrimination and oppression are produced not simply by people making biased judgments, but through laws and institutions that systematically bene t one group over another [3, 86].”
Racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists and intersections with gender (2020, background): “Manifestations of structural bias with respect to race and ethnicity include the over-policing and over-incarceration of communities of color (56, 57); in academia, they also include hiring and retention practices in which racial struggles remain unaccounted for while diversity service work (with wh”
Exploring Student Achievement Gaps in School Districts Across the United States (2020, background): “The report cited sociological issues as potential factors with challenges facing African American children and more specifically African American males; the lack of early childhood education opportunities, perceived economic and social capital in communities, and the disruption of the Black family s”
Community Healing and Resistance Through Storytelling: A Framework to Address Racial Trauma in Africana Communities (2020, background): “The community narratives and acts of resistance among Africana communities and other oppressed groups often get lost in dominant tropes of pathology (e.g., Black inferiority and criminality; Alexander, 2012; Grills et al., 2016).”
To Be Alone or in a Group: An Exploration Into How the School-Based Experiences Differ for Black Male Teachers Across One Urban School District (2018, unknown): “The in-school challenges Black boys face, on average, parallel their out-ofschool challenges (Alexander, 2010; A. Cooper & Smith, 2011; Guerino, Harrison, & Sabol, 2011; Jackson, Sealey-Ruiz, & Watson, 2013).”