"The New Jim Crow"
[Book Review: 6/30/10]
(c) '10 Mumia Abu-Jamal
{Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (NY: The New Press, 2010, pp.290)
The book, The New Jim Crow,
offers an unflinching look at the US addiction to imprisonment, and
comes up with a startling diagnosis; American corporate greed, political
opportunism and the exploitation of age old hatred and fears have
congealed to create a monstrous explosion in the world's largest prison
industrial complex. Further, the author, a law professor at Ohio State
University's Moritz College of Law, Michelle Alexander, digs deep into
US history, and deeper still into US criminal law and practice to
conclude that the barbarous system of repression and control known
commonly as Jim Crow, had a rebirth in this era. That's why she calls it: The New Jim Crow.
This
system of legal discrimination came into being much as the first one
did. After the rout of the South by the Civil War, millions of newly
freed Africans exercised these new rights under Reconstruction. Black
men became senators and legislators across the South. But this period
was short lived, and as soon as possible, states passed harsh laws known
as Black Codes, which denied rights and criminalized behavior by
Blacks, and exposed them to the repression of southern prisons, where
convicts were leased out to labor for others; it was the rebirth of
slavery by other means.
This
present era began at the height of the US Civil Rights Movement, when
millions of Blacks fought for their rights denied for more than a
century.
Alexander
concludes that this new system, this new coalescence of economic and
political interests, targeted Blacks, especially those engaged in the
drug industry, as the human capital with which to provide massive
construction, huge prison staffs, and the other appendages of the
apparatus of state repression.
But
perhaps Alexander's most salient point is her finding that America's
Black population constitutes a 'racial caste' that feeds and perpetuates
mass incarceration [195]
Indeed,
every other societal structure supports this superstructure, from
broken schools, to de-industrialization, to population concentration in
isolated urban ghettoes, to the violence of police, and the silence of
the Black Middle class.
One
might argue that such a claim seems unsustainable when we see a Black
president, hundreds of black political figures and those in
entertainment and sports. But Alexander explains that every system
allows exceptions, for they serve to legitimize the system and mask its
ugliness and its gross effects upon the majority of Blacks.
For
example, while it's well-known that apartheid was an overtly racist
system, it allowed Asian and even African American diplomats to live and
work in such a regime, by the political expediency of identifying them
as "honorary whites" in their official papers.
When
comparing both systems, Alexander argues that the US imprisons more
Blacks both in raw number and per capita than South Africa at the height
of apartheid!
The New Jim Crow - indeed!
--(c) '10 maj
================
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