the new jim crow essay

The New Jim Crow

Michelle alexander, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The book begins with a Foreword by Cornel West, who argues that it will prove indispensable to the fight against racial justice in the contemporary moment and that it embodies “the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. ” West critiques the political climate that has flourished under President Barack Obama , arguing that despite the apparent signs of racial progress, the United States is still a deeply divided, unequal, and unjust society. He urges the reader to reject the language of “colorblindness” and instead embrace the fight for justice. In the Preface, Michelle Alexander notes that the book was not “written for everyone,” but hopes that it will inform and inspire those who are not yet fully aware of the problem of mass incarceration, as well as provide solace to those who are currently incarcerated.

The Introduction begins with Alexander’s comparison between an incarcerated African-American man today and the man’s ancestors who, like him, were denied basic rights as a result of slavery and Jim Crow, respectively. Alexander explains that ten years ago, she was suspicious of the claim that mass incarceration was a “new Jim Crow,” but that while working on racial justice advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union she came to change her mind. Rather than a neutral system suffering from a problem of racial bias, mass incarceration is inherently a system of “racialized social control” distinctly similar to Jim Crow.

Although it might seem alarming to claim that the War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy, there are certainly many conspiratorial aspects to its history—including the fact that it was started during a period in which drug crime was actually on the decline. Alexander criticizes the lack of action against mass incarceration, which she suspects was partially facilitated by the election of Barack Obama. According to Alexander, Obama’s victory distracted people from the fact that “a human rights nightmare is taking place on our watch.”

In Chapter One, Alexander examines the history of racial caste systems in America, arguing that the cycle of different systems of racist control prove that racism is “adaptable” and will change to suit a particular era. During the colonial period, black people were brought to America as cheap labor and placed at the bottom of the racial caste system created by slavery. This system was eventually replaced by Jim Crow, which, although it looked different from slavery, operated according to the same principles of monitoring, regulating, and suppressing black people. When the civil rights movement tore down Jim Crow, it seemed sadly inevitable that another racist system of control would emerge in its place. This system took the form of the War on Drugs, which used the crack epidemic as an excuse to aggressively police and incarcerate an enormous number of poor people of color. Although the War on Drugs gained much of its momentum under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, it survived beyond Reagan’s presidency and was further escalated by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Chapter Two describes the criminal justice system through a step-by-step analysis of the process of being arrested, charged, and incarcerated for a drug offense. Alexander argues that a key part of the War on Drugs has been allowing the police to operate with very little oversight. A series of major court cases have given the police free reign to stop people at random, and it is now all but impossible for civil rights litigators to challenge discriminatory police practices such as “stop and frisk.” Meanwhile, the police have been made even more powerful by the federal government’s decision to outfit drug units in full military gear, to deploy SWAT teams on drug busts, and to allow police departments to seize the assets of anyone who is merely suspected of being involved in drug crime. This last policy has served as a massive incentive for police aggression in the War on Drugs, and many police departments across the country are now primarily funded by assets seized during drug investigations.

Alexander moves on to describe the many injustices that have plagued courtrooms since the War on Drugs began, including the fact that many people never meet their lawyers and are pressured into accepting plea bargains, often without fully understanding their rights or the consequences of this decision. She adds that mandatory minimum sentences have led to people being locked away for years and even decades for minor infractions, including first time offenses.

In Chapter Three Alexander examines the racial discrimination embedded within the criminal justice system. She points out that in some states, 80-90% of those sent to prison on drug charges are African American. This enormous discrepancy cannot be blamed either on black culture or “old-fashioned,” deliberate racism. Rather, much of the racial injustice of mass incarceration can in fact be attributed to unconscious bias. This is made worse by laws that may appear to be race-neutral on the surface, but in fact operate in deeply racist ways; this includes the one hundred-to-one ratio in sentencing recommendations for crack versus powder cocaine. Whereas there is little substantial difference between the two forms of cocaine, crack is more closely associated with black people—and carries sentences a hundred times longer than powder cocaine, which is generally associated with wealthy whites. Meanwhile, black people are often barred from serving on juries as a result of bizarre (yet ostensibly race-neutral) rules, meaning that many African Americans are tried by all-white juries.

In Chapter Four, Alexander considers the stigma associated with being a convicted felon in today’s world. She argues that when defendants are offered plea deals that do not include prison time, they will likely not be aware of how much their lives will be affected by being classed as criminals and relegated to the “undercaste” of American society. Felons are constantly given the impression that they are not wanted within mainstream society, and must navigate an impossible maze of rules, restrictions, fines, and fees in order to avoid being sent immediately back to jail. In many states, convicted felons are denied the right to receive public assistance and vote. Many jobs require applicants to state whether or not they have a criminal record, which makes it all-but-impossible for many felons to find legal employment. Even if they are able to secure a job, many of the recently incarcerated owe the state so much in fees that their entire paycheck is seized in order to pay these debts. As a result, many end up homeless and driven to crime once again.

Alexander argues that, contrary to the views of many people, poor people of color simply want to live ordinary, safe, and healthy lives, but do not have the opportunities or resources to make this happen for themselves. While some people blame gangsta rap culture on the high rates of violence and drug use in African-American communities, research has shown that it is in fact poverty and lack of job opportunities that drives people to crime.

In Chapter Five, Alexander examines moments in which prominent figures in the media, politics, and popular culture have asked the question: “Where have all the black men gone?”. She finds it odd that, despite the ubiquity of this question, nobody gives the honest answer that a large percentage of them are in prison. Alexander argues that in order to address the problem of mass incarceration, we must become more honest about the fact that it is taking place.

Alexander reviews the many similarities between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Both were created in order to redirect the anger of working-class whites away from economic issues and toward the scapegoat of people of color. Both systems racially segregate people to the point of creating two separate worlds, and both depend on legal and political disenfranchisement in order to survive. Crucially, both systems also heavily depend on the association between black people and criminality. Having reviewed these similarities, Alexander moves on to note some major differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. The most important of these is the fact that where Jim Crow was overtly racist, mass incarceration is—on the surface—race-neutral. As a result, there has not been an inter-class solidarity movement among African Americans working to end mass incarceration in the same way there was in the case of Jim Crow. In fact, some African-American leaders have in fact voiced support for the “tough on crime” approach that has created and sustained mass incarceration. This has created divisions in the African-American community as well as among racial justice advocates in general, which Alexander urges must be solved in order for there to be any hope of achieving justice.

In the sixth and final chapter, Alexander argues that people have been living in a state of “collective denial” over the issue of mass incarceration. She is particularly critical of the silence on the issue among civil rights lawyers, who we would expect to have more awareness about it than the general public. Alexander points out that mass incarceration is a notably different problem than the racial justice issues over which civil rights lawyers have successfully taken action in the past. Whereas in the 1950s litigators were keen to use “respectable” figures such as Rosa Parks as the face of their campaigns, it is difficult of find convicted felons who will be deemed “respectable” among the general public. Because of this dilemma, civil rights lawyers have tended to focus on issues such as affirmative action, which affect middle-class, wealthy, “innocent” black people rather than the poor and incarcerated.

Alexander admits that she does not have a concrete vision for addressing mass incarceration, but that she hopes she will inspire others to develop detailed plans. She argues that it is vital not to get caught up in small, individual instances of reform but rather to focus on dismantling the entire system. She stresses the importance of attacking private investment in prisons, ending racial profiling, demilitarizing the police force, legalizing marijuana and perhaps other drugs, eradicating drug forfeiture laws, and—perhaps most important of all—winning in “the court of public opinion.”

Alexander suggests that, in contrast to the dominant view of the civil rights community, it might be necessary to end affirmative action in order to achieve true racial justice. she explains that Americans have been placated by the presence of “cosmetic racial diversity,” which has distracted from the reality of stark racial injustice. She invokes the revolutionary vision of Martin Luther King, who stressed that America will never be a fair or equal country until poor people of all races are no longer oppressed. Alexander then includes a quotation from James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew published in The Fire Next Time . In the letter, Baldwin urges his nephew to remain strong and promises that the fight for justice can be won. The book ends with Baldwin’s statement: “We cannot be free until they are free.”

The New Jim Crow

How mass incarceration turns people of color into permanent second-class citizens

by Michelle Alexander

December 6, 2010

The first time I encountered the idea that our criminal-justice system functions much like a racial caste system, I dismissed the notion. It was more than 10 years ago in Oakland when I was rushing to catch the bus and spotted a bright orange sign stapled to a telephone pole. It screamed in large, bold print: "The Drug War is the New Jim Crow." I scanned the text of the flyer and then muttered something like, "Yeah, the criminal-justice system is racist in many ways, but making such an absurd comparison doesn't help. People will just think you're crazy." I then hopped on the bus and headed to my new job as director of the Racial Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

What a difference a decade makes. After years of working on issues of racial profiling, police brutality, and drug-law enforcement in poor communities of color as well as working with former inmates struggling to "re-enter" a society that never seemed to have much use for them, I began to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal-justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but a different beast entirely. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy, nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of racial control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States has, in fact, emerged as a comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify severe inequality. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, depending on the state you're in, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

More than two million African Americans are currently under the control of the criminal-justice system -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole. During the past few decades, millions more have cycled in and out of the system; indeed, nearly 70 percent of people released from prison are re-arrested within three years. Most people appreciate that millions of African Americans were locked into a second-class status during slavery and Jim Crow, and that these earlier systems of racial control created a legacy of political, social, and economic inequality that our nation is still struggling to overcome. Relatively few, however, seem to appreciate that millions of African Americans are subject to a new system of control -- mass incarceration -- which also has a devastating effect on families and communities. The harm is greatly intensified when prisoners are released. As criminologist Jeremy Travis has observed, "In this brave new world, punishment for the original offense is no longer enough; one's debt to society is never paid."

The scale of incarceration-related discrimination is astonishing. Ex-offenders are routinely stripped of essential rights. Current felon-disenfranchisement laws bar 13 percent of African American men from casting a vote, thus making mass incarceration an effective tool of voter suppression -- one reminiscent of the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow era. Employers routinely discriminate against an applicant based on criminal history, as do landlords. In most states, it is also legal to make ex-drug offenders ineligible for food stamps. In some major urban areas, if you take into account prisoners -- who are excluded from poverty and unemployment statistics, thus masking the severity of black disadvantage -- more than half of working-age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In Chicago, for instance, nearly 80 percent of working-age African American men had criminal records in 2002. These men are permanently locked into an inferior, second-class status, or caste, by law and custom.

The official explanation for this is crime rates. Our prison population increased sevenfold in less than 30 years, going from about 300,000 to more than 2 million, supposedly due to rising crime in poor communities of color.

Crime rates, however, actually have little to do with incarceration rates. Crime rates have fluctuated during the past 30 years and today are at historical lows, but incarceration rates have consistently soared. Most sociologists and criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates have moved independently of each other; incarceration rates have skyrocketed regardless of whether crime has gone up or down in any particular community or in the nation as a whole.

What caused the unprecedented explosion in our prison population? It turns out that the activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were right: The "war on drugs" is the single greatest contributor to mass incarceration in the United States. Drug convictions accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state prison system between 1985 and 2000 -- the period of the U.S. penal system's most dramatic expansion.

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of this war is not to root out violent offenders or drug kingpins. In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, while only one out five were for sales. A 2007 report from Sentencing Project found that most people in state prison for drug offenses had no history of violence or significant selling activity. Nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s, when the drug war peaked, could be attributed to possession of marijuana, a substance less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities and on college campuses as in poor communities of color.

The drug war, though, has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, despite the fact that studies consistently indicate that people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. This is not what one would guess by peeking inside our nation's prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In 2000, African Americans made up 80 percent to 90 percent of imprisoned drug offenders in some states.

The extraordinary racial disparities in our criminal-justice system would not exist today but for the complicity of the United States Supreme Court. In the failed war on drugs, our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures have been eviscerated. Stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color are now routine; the arbitrary and discriminatory police practices the framers aimed to prevent are now commonplace. Justice Thurgood Marshall, in a strident dissent in the 1989 case of Skinner v. Railway Labor Executive Association , felt compelled to remind the Court that there is "no drug exception" to the Fourth Amendment. His reminder was in vain. The Supreme Court had begun steadily unraveling Fourth Amendment protections against stops, interrogations, and seizures in bus stops, train stations, schools, workplaces, airports, and on sidewalks in a series of cases starting in the early 1980s. These aggressive sweep tactics in poor communities of color are now as accepted as separate water fountains were several decades ago.

If the system is as rife with conscious and unconscious bias, many people often ask, why aren't more lawsuits filed? Why not file class-action lawsuits challenging bias by the police or prosecutors? Doesn't the 14th Amendment guarantee equal protection of the law?

What many don't realize is that the Supreme Court has ruled that in the absence of conscious, intentional bias -- tantamount to an admission or a racial slur -- you can't present allegations of race discrimination in the criminal-justice system. These rulings have created a nearly insurmountable hurdle, as law-enforcement officials know better than to admit racial bias out loud, and much of the discrimination that pervades this system is rooted in unconscious racial stereotypes, or "hunches" about certain types of people that come down to race. Because these biases operate unconsciously, the only proof of bias is in the outcomes: how people of different races are treated. The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that no matter how severe the racial disparities, and no matter how overwhelming or compelling the statistical evidence may be, you must have proof of conscious, intentional bias to present a credible case of discrimination. In this way, the system of mass incarceration is now immunized from judicial scrutiny for racial bias, much as slavery and Jim Crow laws were once protected from constitutional challenge.

As a nation, we have managed to create a massive system of control that locks a significant percentage of our population -- a group defined largely by race -- into a permanent, second-class status. This is not the fault of one political party. It is not merely the fault of biased police, prosecutors, or judges. We have all been complicit in the emergence of mass incarceration in the United States. In the so-called era of colorblindness, we have become blind not so much to race as to the re-emergence of caste in America. We have turned away from those labeled "criminals," viewing them as "others" unworthy of our concern. Some of us have been complicit by remaining silent, even as we have a sneaking suspicion that something has gone horribly wrong. We must break that silence and awaken to the human-rights nightmare that is occurring on our watch.

We, as a nation, can do better than this.

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Ten Years After “The New Jim Crow”

By David Remnick

Sometimes a book comes along and, after it is absorbed into the culture, we cannot see ourselves again in quite the same way. Ten years ago, Michelle Alexander, a lawyer and civil-rights advocate, published “ The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness .” This was less than two years into Barack Obama’s first term as President, a moment when you heard a lot of euphoric talk about post-racialism and “how far we’ve come.” “The New Jim Crow” was hardly an immediate best-seller, but after a couple of years it took off and seemed to be at the center of discussion about criminal-justice reform and racism in America. The book considers not only the enormity and cruelty of the American prison system but also, as Alexander writes, the way the war on drugs and the justice system have been used as a “system of control” that shatters the lives of millions of Americans—particularly young black and Hispanic men.

As part of an hour-long examination of mass incarceration for The New Yorker Radio Hour, co-hosted this week by Kai Wright, of WNYC, I caught up with Michelle Alexander, who is now teaching at Union Theological Seminary, in New York.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When “The New Jim Crow” came out, a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for “the person I was ten years ago.” Take me back to those times and to the work you were doing for the A.C.L.U. What were you finding out?

That would have been twenty years ago from today. It was just as I was beginning my work with the A.C.L.U. I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal-justice system, and that bias pervaded all of our political, social, and economic systems. That’s why I was a civil-rights lawyer: I was hoping to finish the work that had been begun by civil-rights leaders who came before me. I had a very romantic idea of what civil-rights lawyers had done and could do to address the challenges that we face.

My impression back then was that our criminal-justice system was infected with racial bias, much in the same way that all institutions in our society are infected to some degree or another with racial and gender bias. But what I didn’t understand at that time was that a new system of racial and social control had been born again in America, a system eerily reminiscent to those that we had left behind.

In fact, I was heading to work my first day at the A.C.L.U. directing the Racial Justice Project when I happened to notice a sign posted to a telephone pole that said, in bold print, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.” I remember pausing for a moment and scanning the text of the flyer and seeing that a small, apparently radical group was holding a meeting at a church several blocks away. They were organizing to protest racial profiling, the drug war, the three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and police brutality. The list went on and on. I remember thinking to myself, Yeah, the criminal-justice system is racist in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t help to make comparisons to Jim Crow. People will just think you’re crazy. And then I hopped on the bus.

So it was really as a result of myself representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality, and investigating patterns of drug-law enforcement in poor communities of color, and attempting to assist people who had been released from prison as they faced one closed door and one barrier after another to mere survival after being released from prison that I had a series of experiences that began what I have come to call my awakening.

What was that awakening like? What were you seeing in your work so that the scales were falling from your eyes?

Well, there were a number of incidents. It was partly beginning to collect data and trace patterns of policing. It was coming to see how the police were behaving in radically different ways in poor communities of color than they were in middle-class, white, or suburban communities. I mean, this wasn’t a shock to me in any way, but the scale of it was astonishing: seeing rows of black men lined up against walls being frisked and handcuffed and arrested for extremely minor crimes, like loitering, or vagrancy, or possession of tiny amounts of marijuana, and then being hauled off to jail and saddled with criminal records that authorized legal discrimination against them for the rest of their lives. I mean, witnessing it and interviewing people one after another had its impact on me.

But there was one incident in particular that really kind of rocked my world. It involved a young African-American man who was about nineteen, who walked into my office one day and forever changed the way I viewed myself as a civil-rights lawyer and the system I was up against. He walked in my office carrying a stack of papers a couple of inches thick. He had taken detailed notes of his encounters with the police over about a nine-month period: every stop, every search, every time he had been frisked or someone he was riding with had been stopped, searched, or frisked. He had names of officers, in some cases badge numbers, names of witnesses—just an extraordinary amount of documentation.

At the time, I was interviewing people for a possible class-action suit against the Oakland Police Department. We had already filed a major class-action suit against the California Highway Patrol, alleging racial profiling in their drug-interdiction program, and we had launched a major campaign against racial profiling in California, and we were looking to sue other police departments, as well. And we had set up a hotline number for people to call if they had been stopped or targeted by the police on the basis of race. Within the first few minutes of us announcing this hotline number on the evening news, we received thousands of calls, and our system crashed temporarily. So I was spending my day interviewing one young black or brown man after another who had called the hotline.

This man’s story was so compelling. I thought, Wow, maybe we have finally found our dream plaintiff. I start asking him more questions. He’s sharing more details and information. And then he said something that made me pause: Did you just say you’re a drug felon?

We had been screening people for criminal records when they called our hotline number. We would ask them a bunch of questions about their experience with the police. We sent a form for them to fill out. And one of the questions was: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? We believed we couldn’t represent anyone with a felony record because we knew that, if we did, law enforcement would be all over them, saying, Well, of course we’re keeping an eye on the criminals and stopping and harassing them. This isn’t about race. It’s about us cracking down on the criminals.

And we knew we couldn’t put someone on the stand as a named plaintiff in a class action alleging racial profiling if they had a felony record, because we'd be exposing them to cross-examination about their prior criminal history and turning it into a mini-trial about a young man’s criminal past rather than the police conduct.

So we’d been screening out people with felony records, and this young man hadn’t checked his box. I’m looking at him, saying, “O.K., you’re a drug felon. Are you telling me you’re a drug felon?” And he gets very quiet and stares down at the table and then finally looks up and says, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a drug felon. But let me tell you what happened. Police planted drugs on me, and they beat up me and my friend.” And he starts telling me this long story about how he’d been framed and drugs have been planted on him. And I just start shaking my head. I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t represent you with a felony record.” And now he’s trying to give me more details and explain more about that case. And I keep telling him, “I’m sorry, I just can’t represent you.” And he becomes more and more agitated and upset. And then, finally, he becomes enraged, and he says, “What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?”

And he starts explaining that he’d just taken the plea because he was afraid of doing the time. They told him that if he just took the plea, you just walk out with just felony probation. And he said, “But what’s to become of me? I can’t get a job anywhere because of my felony record. Do you understand? I have to sleep in my grandma’s basement at night. I can’t even get into public housing with a drug felony. It’s, like, how am I supposed to take care of myself? How am I supposed to take care of myself as a man?” He’s, like, “I can’t even feed myself. . . . Do you know I can’t even get food stamps because of my drug felony? Good luck finding one young black man in my neighborhood they haven’t gotten to yet. They’ve gotten to us all already.”

What was so provocative about the handbill that you first saw on the telephone pole, and in what became the title of your book, is that it flew in the face of what politicians said their motivation was for things like the crime bill in the mid-nineties, during the Clinton Administration. In other words, they said they were passing this legislation because crime rates were so high and drugs were out of control. What you’re saying, what that handbill said, is no, in fact, this is the establishment of a means of social control of young black and brown men in particular. How conscious was that? How would you argue that it was a conscious decision to establish a successor, in a sense, to Jim Crow, and what came before Jim Crow?

There were mixed motives. One of the things that I laid out in the book was the history of the Southern strategy, the deliberate political strategy of divide and conquer, of using “get tough” racial appeals in order to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were fearful of and resentful of the progress that had been made by African-Americans since the civil-rights movement, who feared that they now had to compete for limited jobs in the era of deindustrialization with black folks. They were resentful of affirmative action.

Fearmongering and scapegoating was at the heart of the Southern strategy, which used racially coded and not so coded political appeals defining black and brown men in particular as the enemy, as criminals, as drug users, as superpredators, in order to appeal to poor and working-class white voters in the South and flip those blue states to red. That Southern strategy fuelled the “get tough” movement, helped to birth the war on drugs, and was in part about turning the clock back on racial progress to a time when white folks didn’t have to compete on equal terms with black and brown folks.

But it’s also the case that racial stereotypes are a result of really racist media portrayals of drug users during the crack epidemic, which created conscious as well as unconscious stereotypes in law enforcement and the public at large. This helped to fuel this notion that we should get tough on them, the racially defined Others.

So the drug war was in part a politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil-rights movement, but it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fuelled by media portrayals of drug users. Those racial stereotypes were resonant with the same stereotypes of slaves and folks during the Jim Crow era.

A lot of people think of mass incarceration and “get tough” policies as the result of right-wing politics. But in what ways have liberals also played a part in this history?

I view liberals as equally guilty of birthing the system of mass incarceration as right-wing conservatives. President Bill Clinton escalated the drug war that had been originally declared by President Richard Nixon and then escalated by Ronald Reagan. Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what many of his Republican predecessors ever dreamed. And he did so in part to prove that he could be tougher on them, the black criminals, than his Republican counterparts.

I think it must also be acknowledged that there were black politicians and black communities calling for tough responses to rising crime in inner-city communities that were suffering from economic collapse. But it’s important to draw a distinction between black politicians and black communities that were desperate for intervention as factories closed and disappeared, and work disappeared, as William Julius Wilson described so powerfully in his book “ When Work Disappears .” There was a period of time when hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished practically overnight in poor black communities, and they suffered depression and economic collapse. Crime rates rose and people were desperate for a meaningful, quick response.

But it would be wrong, in my view, to say that mass incarceration was supported by black communities. Black communities have organized for and demanded many large-scale interventions to address economic inequality, crime, educational inequality over the years. And it has only been in the area of crime that our nation has been willing to respond with massive investments in police, prisons, mass surveillance.

You were writing this book as Barack Obama was starting out his Presidency. Did his election make it harder for people to hear your argument at first? In fact, your book did not really take off the way it did for a little while.

Yes, that’s absolutely right. Many people think that “The New Jim Crow” was an instant best-seller.

But it took a couple of years, right?

Yes. People didn’t want to hear that we were still locked in a cycle of racial progress, backlash, retrenchment, and reformation of systems of racial and social control. It seemed much more likely that we were in an era of post-racialism, a time of color blindness, or at least on our way towards that Promised Land. I spent a couple of years on the road pretty much non-stop, speaking to small crowds and churches and groups of students and activists, really desperate to sound an alarm and to help people to see that, no, we are not free of our racial history. Our nation has, in fact, done it again. We have birthed a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world has ever seen. Millions of people have been relegated yet again to a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. It wasn’t a message people were eager to hear, but I think it is much easier to see today, ten years later, that our nation is not yet free of its racial history, and that we continue to create new systems of racial and social control.

Decades ago, politicians were promising to build prison walls and new prisons. Today, politicians are promising border walls and the same politics of divide and conquer, fearmongering, and scapegoating that helped to give rise to the “get tough” movement, and the war on drugs is being used to fuel anger and resentment towards immigrants and mass deportation and mass detention.

While you were writing this book, your husband was working as a federal prosecutor. Did you have disagreements on the ideas that you were laying out? How did you discuss this with somebody so close to you?

My husband and I kind of came to these issues from very different perspectives. I had been working for years as a civil-rights lawyer. When we got married, he decided to become a federal prosecutor. While we both shared a commitment to racial and social justice, it was very difficult for me to accept that he was working for justice on the inside. We definitely had different disagreements over the years. But I also found him to be a very helpful reader. He has always given insightful and useful feedback on my writing and has been incredibly supportive of my work over the years, and so I’m grateful for that. I think it has been helpful in many ways for me to be challenged in my thinking by someone who has seen through the eyes of law enforcement.

There’s been no shortage of books about race and mass incarceration. Why do you think it was your book that captured the public in the way that it did, and still does?

I think the book was published at the right time. Our nation was reeling from an economic crisis that was forcing former “get tough” true believers to take a hard look at the system of mass incarceration. Former governors who had been calling for harsh mandatory minimum sentences and had been fierce drug warriors were suddenly realizing that it was not possible to continue to expand this massive prison state without raising taxes on the predominantly white middle class. And so suddenly people were beginning to ask questions and to be open to the possibility that perhaps this race to incarcerate had been misguided.

At the same time, the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri , forced a conversation about race and our criminal-justice system that our nation had been determined to avoid for a very long time. The activism and the organizing and the passion and heartbreak that flowed from the killing of Trayvon Martin , the killing of Michael Brown , the deaths of Kalief Browder and Sandra Bland opened up a space where people began searching for answers regarding how we got to this place.

I know from your new preface to the tenth-anniversary edition that you got thousands of letters from people who wrote you about the book, many from people who were formerly incarcerated. What were they telling you?

Yeah, it has been overwhelming, over the years, to receive thousands of letters. I’m embarrassed and sad to say that I haven’t been able to read all of them. Some people have written just thanking me for the book and for speaking a truth that they may have been trying to speak in their own communities.

There’s also a lot of people writing me from prison, begging for help. Those are the most heartbreaking letters to read because, often, not only am I not able to help them but there’s no one who I can recommend who can. There is just not available legal support for people who are in prison trying to fight their charges or reduce their sentences.

In the preface you wrote for the tenth-anniversary edition, you kept coming back to this idea of “Everything and nothing has changed.” What’s changed, and what hasn’t? Are we better off now than we were a decade ago, when your book was first published?

Well, certainly, in some ways, on the surface, it appears that everything has changed. When my book was first published, President Obama had just been elected. It seemed that we were on the right path: still had a long way to go, but were headed in the right direction. At least, that was the sentiment that was shared by many, many people. It seemed as though this dream of a multiracial, multi-ethnic, egalitarian democracy was within our reach, and there was an incredible amount of hope for positive change. And yet we were also living in a time of tremendous denial.

As I wrote, a system of mass incarceration had been born in America, a system of racial and social control that turned back much of the racial progress we thought we had made, and people were unwilling to talk about it and to face it. Criminal-justice issues weren’t even really on the radar of civil-rights organizations at that time, with the exception of the A.C.L.U. and some work on racial profiling that was beginning to be done by the N.A.A.C.P. and other organizations. When the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, in 2008, sent out a letter listing the most pressing issues on civil rights, criminal-justice issues didn’t even make the list. And when, in 2009, the Congressional Black Caucus sent out a list of a couple dozen issues that might be of concern to black communities, criminal justice didn’t make the list. This was just as the drug war was raging and the race to incarcerate was going full bore. And so there was a way in which we were asleep and in denial.

Today, that has changed. The election of President Trump has completely decimated whatever fantasies we had that we are living in a post-racial America. We now can see that systems of racial and social control are alive and well, not only due to the uprisings in Ferguson and the many, many publicized police killings of unarmed black people and the growing movements to end mass incarceration. We’ve also come to see how yet another system of racial and social control has been born in this country, the system of mass deportation and mass detention. So we have this paradox in which, on the one hand, it seems that everything has changed, yet the politics of white supremacy have remained largely unchanged during the Obama years. Now we are forced to reckon with racial realities that we had long attempted to avoid, and I think we are finally beginning to see how the politics of divide and conquer, the politics of racial scapegoating and fearmongering, have been used again and again.

Some of the scholars who have been in dialogue with you about your book have taken issue with your focus on the war on drugs and nonviolent drug offenses. John Pfaff, in his book “ Locked In ,” says that only about sixteen per cent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges, and very few of them—maybe about five or six per cent of that group—are both low level and nonviolent. And what he and the other scholars are saying is, even if you released all the people in prisons who were there for drug offenses, nonviolent drug offenses, that would not put a real dent in the prison population.

Well, that’s absolutely right. It is true that roughly half of the people who are held in state prisons today have been convicted of offenses that are labelled violent, and that a small minority of people in prison today have been labelled drug offenders. But one of the main points of “The New Jim Crow” is that it is a profound mistake to think of the system of mass incarceration as simply a system of prisons.

There are twice as many people on probation or parole today as are locked in prisons or jails. When people think about the system of mass incarceration, they typically just think about who’s in prison at any given moment. But what I hope to draw people’s attention to is that this system of mass incarceration is actually a system of mass criminalization. It is a system that criminalizes people at very young ages, often before they’re old enough to vote. It labels them criminals and felons, and then strips them of basic civil rights, the very rights supposedly won in the civil-rights movement. And this happens even if you’ve been sentenced only to probation.

So when people look at prison statistics and say, Oh, well, most people who are in prison are there for violent offenses, so our primary concern must be violent crime, or they think, Oh, well, this prison system is really about responding to violent crime, they get it very wrong.

About five per cent of people who are arrested every year have been convicted of violent crimes or charged with violent crimes. People who have been convicted of violent offenses typically get much, much longer sentences than people who have been convicted of nonviolent crimes like drug offenses. And, therefore, they comprise a much larger portion of the prison population. However, ninety-five per cent of those who are arrested and swept into the criminal-justice system every year have been convicted of nonviolent crimes. And the largest category of arrests are drug arrests. That was true in 2010, and it’s true today.

The war on drugs has been a primary vehicle for sweeping people into a criminal-justice system, branding them criminals and felons, and then relegating them to a permanent second-class status for life. That doesn’t mean we should be unconcerned about violent crime or the harm that it does to communities, nor should we be unconcerned about the extremely long sentences and inhuman treatment that people often receive being caged. But what it does mean is that we have to stop thinking about the system of mass incarceration as simply a prison system.

Michelle, let’s talk about the cages in general. There have been calls in recent years for prison abolition. And I wonder what you make of the prison-abolition movement. I’ll ask you what Angela Davis asks in the title of her famous book from 2003, “ Are Prisons Obsolete? ”

I think prisons are absolutely obsolete. I hope that one day our nation will look back on this practice of putting human beings in literal cages, often treating them worse than we would treat a dog at the pound, sometimes locking them in solitary confinement for decades, allowing them little or no access to sunshine or human contact—I hope that one day we will look back on this practice with as much shame and horror as we view the practice of slavery, or the practice of cutting off limbs and hands of thieves. I hope that we find much more humane, constructive ways of responding to the real harms of violence and of crime than subjecting people to deliberate humiliation, stigmatization, suffering, and caging.

We can do better than this. In my experience, most folks understand that caging people and then stripping them of basic civil and human rights upon their release isn’t productive. In fact, it’s more likely to encourage criminal behavior in the future and make it more difficult for people to survive on the outside without resorting to crime. It’s likely to traumatize people in ways that will be harmful to themselves, to their families, and to their communities. Most people understand that when you talk about drug abuse or drug addiction. People understand that it is much more productive for people to get drug treatment rather than be in a cage. But when it comes to violence, people have a much more difficult time imagining that there are solutions beyond inflicting violence and caging people.

But I’m so encouraged by the work of restorative- and transformative-justice advocates today who are challenging us to think about ways of responding that are more humane and more effective, both for survivors as well as for those who have committed acts of violence.

What do you envision specifically as an alternative to cages, to prisons, to jails? Is there a place in the world that has a justice system that you can point to and say, We definitely should move toward something more like that ?

Well, there’s been a lot written in recent years about systems in Norway and Germany that are much more humane than the system of caging that we have in the United States. I would really encourage people to read Danielle Sered’s book “ Until We Reckon ,” specifically about a program that she operates in New York City called Common Justice. Common Justice is a restorative-justice program that provides alternatives to incarceration for people who have been convicted of or who are facing charges for violent offenses. And what’s interesting about what she has found in the program is that ninety per cent of survivors of violent crime, when given the option of participating in a restorative-justice program, or the opportunity to confront the person who has caused them harm and to devise a plan for that person to try to make up for what they have done in some way, choose to participate in a restorative-justice program rather than to pursue criminal charges and incarceration. This kind of flies in the face of the research that suggests that survivors of violent crime always want people locked up and the key thrown away. In fact, it turns out that survivors of violent crime and the people who have committed harm can come together in many cases, far more often than we imagine, and together develop fair solutions for responding to the harm that’s been caused.

One of the things that is standing in the way of such reform is the fact that a huge number of prisons—seventy per cent, in fact—are located in rural communities and go a long way in bolstering the economies of these communities. I mean, the fact is that prisons are a big source of income for many people living around them. And you make this very clear.

The profit motive is significant. And very often people think about the profit motive simply in terms of private prisons making money off of caging human beings. However, as the book “ Prison Profiteers ,” edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, points out, there is a very large range of corporate interests that make an enormous amount of money off of our prison system—everything from private health-care providers to Taser-gun manufacturers to companies that are now creating these electronic monitors, G.P.S. tracking systems for people when they are released from prison or jail.

E-carceration, you call it.

Yes. One of the things that worries me most today is the emergence of e-carceration, or digital prisons, as some activists refer to them. Many people are now being forced to wear electronic monitors, G.P.S. tracking devices, upon release from prisons and jails. These devices will limit people’s range of movement, confining them to their homes or to their neighborhoods, sometimes making it impossible for them to go to work or pick up their children from school. These tracking devices send off alarms to police departments if people travel out of their designated zones. In many ways, these tracking devices are creating entire neighborhoods that are under a kind of lockdown, as an electronically enforced kind of virtual concentration camp, where large percentages of the population are confined to small areas.

But what do you say to people who argue that these technological solutions are more humane than prisons and jails?

Well, certainly, most people, myself included, would rather have an electronic monitor, a G.P.S. tracking device, attached to my ankle than to be sitting in a literal cage. However, I find it very difficult to call a system of e-carceration and the emergence of digital prisons progress. Progress would be decriminalizing our communities, not subjecting them to new, high-tech forms of surveillance and control.

It is entirely possible that, in the years to come, as private corporations begin investing more and more money—billions of dollars are now being invested in the electronic surveillance of people who have been criminalized—that we will have entire communities and neighborhoods that are trapped in digital prisons. It will be cheaper to surveil and control millions of people electronically than through old-fashioned brick-and-mortar prisons.

So I don’t think we should celebrate the rise of electronic monitoring as a step in the right direction or progress. A step in the right direction would be massive investments in education, drug treatment, health care, and job creation, in trauma support in the communities that have been devastated by the war on drugs and mass incarceration.

We all know that the safest communities are not the ones that have the most police, the most prisons, or the highest percentage of people on electronic monitors under constant surveillance and control. No, what creates safety in our communities are good schools, plentiful jobs, quality health care, and a thriving social fabric.

The racial disparities in prisons over the last decade have actually declined. Is there any reason for hope in that?

It’s absolutely a positive development that racial disparities have declined to the extent that it means that we are relying less and less on criminalization and incarceration of all people, including people of color.

I worry about those who focus primarily on racial disparities in our criminal-justice system as a measure of injustice. In fact, there is some research that suggests that racial disparities have narrowed in part because more white people have been incarcerated or saddled with criminal records as a result of the opioid epidemic , or because, as some people have argued, many Latinos are being mislabelled as white in our criminal-justice system, distorting the data. But I wouldn’t celebrate that kind of progress. The goal here is not to subject people of all colors to unnecessary suffering. The goal ought to be to view and treat all people of all colors with dignity, humanity, compassion, and concern.

However, there is also significant evidence indicating that racial disparities have narrowed in large part because many states, New York included, have moved away from many of the harsh drug-war policies that resulted in enormous racial disparities in incarceration and conviction rates. And that is cause for celebration.

I think, again, we have to make sure that we’re not simply addressing symptoms rather than underlying causes. True progress depends on us caring and demonstrating care, compassion, and concern for poor people, and people of color, and being willing to invest in their well-being and their health and their education and their thriving rather than simply in their punishment and in their control.

All the front-runner candidates for the Democratic nomination support some form or another of criminal-justice reform. Do you have a favorite among them?

No, I am not endorsing anyone at this time.

But, on this issue, is there anybody who seems particularly advanced or to your liking?

Well, I would have to say that I have found Elizabeth Warren ’s and Bernie Sanders ’s criminal-justice platforms to be very encouraging. They’re taking a comprehensive approach to criminal-justice reform and not simply tinkering with the machine by promising to reduce sentencing, for example. Meaningful criminal-justice reform requires taking a very holistic view and insuring that people who are released from prison have meaningful opportunities for education and access to health care and drug treatment and mental-health treatment and support, and that there is a strong commitment to taking the profit motive out of incarceration entirely. And, you know, viewing criminal-justice reform through a racial-justice lens. So I am encouraged that virtually all of the Democratic candidates have stated a willingness to embrace criminal justice-reform to some degree. But for me, personally, I’m less interested in the reform of our criminal-justice system than its transformation. I think we must reimagine the meaning of justice in America, not simply reform our existing criminal-justice institutions. I think that work depends on building and organizing and the engagement of our communities. We can’t simply look to our politicians to have the answers

Finally, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you what seems to be a personal professional question. Your main teaching post has been at an institution that has religion and faith at its center, the Union Theological Seminary. Does that choice represent a change in your thinking on criminal justice or in your own life?

After spending many years working as a civil-rights lawyer and then as a legal, academic, and policy advocate, I became frustrated with the very narrow scope of acceptable discourse in those spaces. As I see it, the crisis of mass incarceration is not simply a legal or political problem to be solved, but it’s a profound spiritual and moral crisis, as well. And it requires a reckoning, individually and collectively, with our racial history, our racial present, and our racial future. Many academics and lawyers are reluctant to face or engage in this reckoning, in part because it seems so big, so overwhelming. Lawyers are accustomed to defining problems in legal terms so that they can solve them. Academics want to study problems. Legal academics want to study problems in a very narrow and often data-driven way, without really asking the deeper questions around, Who are we in relationship to one another? What does justice mean?

And I have found, much to my surprise, that, in progressive seminaries like Union Theological Seminary, there is or there seems to be much greater enthusiasm for wrestling with those deep moral questions of the meaning of justice in a nation forged through genocide and slavery, a multiracial, multiethnic nation that is struggling to overcome its racial history. What does it mean to do justice in this context, in this moment in time?

And I jokingly, although it’s not so much of a joke, tell people who just say to me, “I want to go to law school,” I say, “Well, law school is a place where you learn the rules of the game and how to play it. But it isn’t a place where people think deeply about justice. And I can’t say that’s true for every law school, but it’s true for too many of them. And I’m just grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be affiliated with Union Theological Seminary, which has such a long history of taking questions of justice very seriously and approaching them not just from a legal or political perspective but from a deeply moral one.

Does this mean that religion and faith-based traditions have become more in the center of your thinking and research and writing and your own personal evolution?

Yes, absolutely, although I don’t consider myself a religious person. I’m probably more of a spiritual but not religious person. But, yeah, I think, ultimately, these questions are about: What does it mean to be in the right relationship to one another? Who belongs in a community, in a nation? How should we treat the least advantaged? What do we owe to one another? How do we repair harm? What does it mean to face irreparable harm in a constructive and responsible way?

Are these questions at the center of a next book?

Yes, they are. I’m working on a book that is very different from “The New Jim Crow.” It’s much more personal, and it’s about my journey going from a liberal civil-rights lawyer who was tinkering with the machine, and believed that we could somehow get to the Promised Land if we just filed the next best lawsuit, or met with the governor, or organize the right number of people for the next protest, to someone who now believes that much more revolutionary change is required, and it’s not simply a political revolution. A moral and spiritual revolution is also required of us now.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Mass Incarceration — The New Jim Crow Book Review

A Review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness

• Categories: Mass Incarceration

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Published: Mar 1, 2019

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Table of contents

The new jim crow book report, works cited.

• Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. Teaching Tolerance, 46-69.
• Barkan, S. E. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (Review). Social Forces, 90(3), 1079-1082.
• Belton, D. (2015). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (Review). American Journal of Sociology, 120(5), 1607-1610.
• Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (Review). Harvard Law Review, 126(3), 780-794.
• Williams, K. (2011). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (Review). Contemporary Sociology, 40(6), 682-683.

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The New Jim Crow

64 pages • 2 hours read

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

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Discussion Questions

Looking to the origins of slavery, the Jim Crow era, and mass incarceration, how do racial caste systems evolve over time? How are these systems tailored to the eras from which they arise?

What does Alexander mean by “racial bribes”? What are some of the bribes offered to whites during the onset of various caste systems, including slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration? Do Black Americans ever receive these bribes?

What does Alexander mean by “closing the courthouse doors”? How has the Supreme Court immunized police officers and prosecutors against constitutional challenges on the basis of race? What are some of key court cases Alexander identifies?

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The New Jim Crow Summary, Review and Themes

In her 2010 book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander unveils the unsettling reality that mass incarceration and the War on Drugs serve as contemporary mechanisms of racialized social control, mirroring the Jim Crow laws of the past. 

With a foreword by Cornel West, the book emerges as a critical tool in the ongoing fight for racial justice, embodying the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. West challenges the facade of racial progress under President Barack Obama’s administration, calling for a rejection of “colorblindness” in favor of a more just society.

Alexander begins by drawing parallels between the experiences of modern African-American men and their ancestors, denied basic rights under slavery and Jim Crow. 

Initially skeptical, her work with the American Civil Liberties Union led her to recognize mass incarceration as a system of racialized social control. Despite the declining drug crime when the War on Drugs was declared, Alexander points out its racially motivated underpinnings and criticizes the complacency that followed Obama’s election, highlighting the ongoing human rights crisis.

The book’s first chapter traces the evolution of racial caste in America , from slavery through Jim Crow to the War on Drugs, illustrating racism’s adaptability. Alexander exposes how the crack epidemic was exploited to justify the disproportionate policing and incarceration of poor people of color. 

She critiques the escalation of the War on Drugs under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, emphasizing its enduring impact.

Chapter Two offers a detailed critique of the criminal justice system, from arrest to incarceration for drug offenses. 

Alexander condemns the unchecked power of the police, the militarization of drug units, and the financial incentives for aggressive policing. 

She also highlights the courtroom injustices, including coerced plea bargains and mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately impact African Americans.

In Chapter Three, Alexander addresses the embedded racial discrimination within the criminal justice system, challenging the narrative of racial neutrality. 

She points to the skewed sentencing ratios for crack versus powder cocaine as evidence of systemic racism, further exacerbated by the exclusion of black people from juries.

Chapter Four discusses the lifelong stigma of being labeled a felon, outlining the numerous barriers to reintegration faced by those with criminal records. 

Alexander illustrates how these barriers perpetuate a cycle of poverty and recidivism, effectively relegating many to a permanent underclass.

Chapter Five questions the widespread ignorance of the fact that a significant portion of African-American men are incarcerated, urging for honesty and awareness in addressing mass incarceration.

In her final chapter, Alexander criticizes the collective denial surrounding mass incarceration, particularly among civil rights lawyers. She calls for a comprehensive approach to reform, including ending private prison investments, demilitarizing the police, legalizing marijuana, and changing public opinion.

Concluding with a revolutionary vision inspired by Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, Alexander challenges the efficacy of affirmative action and the illusion of progress, advocating for a society where justice is truly inclusive, with the book not just being another nonfiction novel but a wake-up call to dismantle the structures of racial injustice, ensuring freedom and equality for all.

Reading Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” was an eye-opening experience that forced me to confront uncomfortable truths about the American justice system and its impact on communities of color. 

As someone who has always believed in the principles of justice and equality, the revelations in this book shook me to the core, revealing a reality far removed from the ideals I held dear.

Alexander’s meticulous research and compelling argumentation lay bare the systemic racism entrenched within the U.S. policing and judicial systems. 

The staggering growth of the prison population, from three hundred thousand in 1980 to over two million today, highlights a disturbing trend towards mass incarceration, disproportionately affecting African American and Latino communities. 

This isn’t just about numbers; it’s about real lives being unjustly derailed. The evidence presented dismantles any denial of racial bias in arrests and sentencing, showing a clear pattern of targeting that cannot be ignored.

The comparison to the Jim Crow laws isn’t made lightly. 

Alexander convincingly argues that the War on Drugs has created a new system of racial segregation, trapping millions in a cycle of incarceration and discrimination. The lifelong penalties that follow a conviction—loss of voting rights, ineligibility for public housing and food stamps, and a branded criminal status—effectively marginalize individuals for minor offenses, often as trivial as possessing a small amount of marijuana. 

This draconian approach to justice not only devastates individuals and families but also perpetuates poverty and crime in a self-fulfilling prophecy of criminalization.

Alexander doesn’t shy away from critiquing the expansion of police powers and the erosion of constitutional rights. The financial incentives for drug arrests and property seizures have led to a culture of policing more concerned with profit than public safety, eroding trust in law enforcement and making a mockery of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” 

The militarization of police forces and the broad leeway given for searches and seizures have further alienated communities from those sworn to protect them.

Despite the heavy academic tone and occasional repetition, Alexander’s message is clear and urgent. 

The scale of injustice and abuse she unveils demands attention and action. 

The final chapters of the book offer a glimmer of hope, suggesting paths for mobilization and reform. Yet, the challenge ahead is daunting, requiring a societal shift akin to the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century.

To conclude, this book has not only educated me but also galvanized me to advocate for change, to ensure that the future does not mirror the injustices of the past.

1. The Evolution of Racial Caste Systems in America

Michelle Alexander meticulously traces the transformation of racial control mechanisms from the era of slavery, through the Jim Crow laws, to the present-day system of mass incarceration. 

This theme delves into the idea that racism in America is not static but evolves to adapt to the social and political climate of each era. Alexander argues that while the forms of control have changed, the underlying intent to maintain a racial hierarchy remains constant. 

By drawing parallels between past and present systems of racial oppression, the book exposes the cyclical nature of these mechanisms, highlighting how each system, although distinct in appearance, serves the same fundamental purpose of subjugating African American communities and maintaining white supremacy.

2. The War on Drugs as a Mechanism for Racial Control

A central theme of the book is the critique of the War on Drugs, which Alexander identifies as a major driver of mass incarceration in the United States. 

She argues that the War on Drugs was initiated and escalated at times when drug crime was declining, not increasing, suggesting that its true purpose was not to combat drug use but to target African American communities. 

Alexander illustrates how policies and practices associated with the War on Drugs, such as stop and frisk, militarization of the police, and asset forfeiture, have been wielded disproportionately against people of color. 

This theme explores the idea that the War on Drugs operates as a contemporary form of racialized social control, effectively criminalizing large segments of the African American population and reinforcing the association between blackness and criminality.

3. The Impact of Mass Incarceration on African American Communities

Through her examination of the criminal justice system, Alexander reveals the devastating impact of mass incarceration on individuals, families, and communities. 

This theme focuses on the collateral consequences of a felony conviction, which extend far beyond prison walls. Alexander discusses how the label of “felon” or “criminal” subjects individuals to a lifetime of discrimination, affecting their ability to find employment, secure housing, access education , and participate in the democratic process. 

By highlighting the systemic barriers that keep formerly incarcerated individuals trapped in a cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement, Alexander sheds light on the creation of a racial undercaste—a group of people relegated to the lowest rung of society, where they are denied basic rights and opportunities. 

This theme not only explores the social and economic fallout of mass incarceration but also challenges readers to reconsider the notion of justice in a society that systematically marginalizes entire communities.

Final Thoughts

“The New Jim Crow” is a compelling, meticulously researched critique of the U.S. criminal justice system and its role in perpetuating racial inequality. 

Michelle Alexander’s analysis is not just a call to acknowledge the modern racial caste system but a rallying cry for profound social and legal reforms. By drawing parallels between historical and contemporary forms of racial control, Alexander not only sheds light on the complexities of systemic racism but also challenges us to envision and strive for a more just and equitable society. 

A team of Editors at Books That Slay.

Passionate | Curious | Permanent Bibliophiles

Shattered Illusions: the Reverberations of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”

This essay about Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” explores how the American criminal justice system functions as a modern form of racial control. It highlights how the War on Drugs, initiated in the 1980s, disproportionately targeted Black communities, leading to a dramatic increase in the incarceration rates of Black men. Alexander’s work examines the devastating collateral consequences of incarceration, such as the loss of voting rights and employment opportunities, which perpetuate poverty and disenfranchisement. The essay underscores Alexander’s call for a shift in how society addresses crime, advocating for solutions that prioritize rehabilitation over punishment. Ultimately, it emphasizes the importance of confronting systemic racism to create a more equitable future.

How it works

In Michelle Alexander’s provocative discourse, “The New Jim Crow,” the veneer of equality in America is peeled back to reveal a stark reality: the criminal justice system has become a modern-day tool of oppression, akin to the segregationist policies of the past. Alexander’s treatise ignites a firestorm of introspection, forcing readers to confront uncomfortable truths about race, power, and privilege in society.

At the heart of Alexander’s argument lies the insidious impact of the War on Drugs, launched amidst the fervor of the 1980s.

Through a meticulous unraveling of historical threads, she exposes how this ostensible campaign against narcotics morphed into a thinly veiled assault on Black communities. The selective enforcement of drug laws in urban areas, coupled with draconian sentencing policies, led to an unprecedented surge in the incarceration rates of Black men. In this narrative, the War on Drugs emerges not as a noble crusade for public safety, but as a calculated strategy to marginalize and control communities of color.

But Alexander’s analysis extends beyond the confines of the courtroom, delving into the far-reaching tentacles of collateral consequences. She paints a haunting portrait of lives shattered by incarceration – families torn asunder, futures dashed against the rocks of systemic injustice. The loss of voting rights, employment opportunities, and access to social services perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement, ensnaring generations in the web of the criminal justice system. In this way, mass incarceration becomes more than a statistical anomaly; it becomes a mechanism of social control, relegating Black individuals to the margins of society.

Yet, amidst the bleakness of her narrative, Alexander offers a glimmer of hope – a call to arms against the machinery of oppression. She challenges readers to interrogate their complicity in perpetuating systems of inequality and to imagine new paradigms of justice and community. By reframing the discourse around crime and punishment, she invites us to confront our biases and reimagine a world where compassion and rehabilitation take precedence over punishment and retribution. In this vision, justice becomes a collective endeavor, requiring solidarity and empathy to dismantle the structures of oppression.

Indeed, the resonance of Alexander’s work extends far beyond the confines of academia, permeating the cultural zeitgeist and catalyzing movements for social change. From grassroots activists to policymakers, her words serve as a rallying cry for those who dare to envision a more just and equitable society. Through her searing indictment of the status quo, she compels us to confront the uncomfortable truths that lurk beneath the surface of our collective consciousness.

In conclusion, “The New Jim Crow” is more than a scholarly treatise; it is a testament to the power of storytelling to provoke, inspire, and incite change. Through her meticulous research and impassioned advocacy, Michelle Alexander lays bare the systemic injustices that plague our society, challenging us to confront our complicity and strive for a more equitable future. As we grapple with the enduring legacy of racism in America, Alexander’s work stands as a beacon of hope, guiding us towards a more just and inclusive society for all.

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Essay on Alexander The New Jim Crow Analysis

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a book that discusses racially related issues in the United States, Alexander relies on the fact that a high percentage of African Americans are being excluded and discriminated in society. She believes that the U. S. Criminal Justice System through the War On Drugs is used to label African-Americans as criminals as well as is use to discriminate, since after being labeled as a felon you are excluded from public benefits such as employment, housing, voting and other benefits.

For instance, Alexander supports her argument by telling the story of Jarvious Cotton, his father could not vote because of the voting poll taxes and literacy test back in the Jim Crow era, and now as a felon and currently on parole, he is being denied the right to vote (alexander 1). Alexander, using this story as an example perfectly fulfills and persuades the reader into her argument, that even through time, the similarity of discrimination is the same between mass incarceration and Jim Crow, where the U. S. criminal justice system deprives them of the right to vote .

Therefore, Alexander also mentions an example about mass incarceration. For instance, the story of Drake, a Vietnam veteran, who spend five years in jail and as 2004 elections arrived, his voting rights were under a $900 dollar fine (Alexander 159). This example successfully convinces the reader, as mentioned the obstacles an ex-felon like drake encounters in order to have the right to vote such as paying a high-priced fine, is compared to Jim Crow and it’s poll taxes. Alexander did not only gave an example where the Jim Crow law took place, but also included a recent a like situation where the similarities are not quite different.

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The New Jim Crow

By michelle alexander, the new jim crow essay questions.

What are the similarities and differences between slavery, Jim Crow, and the New Jim Crow?

In the system of slavery, blacks had utterly no rights whatsoever and were locked into a closed system of exploitation. It was race-based and not eradicated until the Civil War. It was characterized by extreme and arbitrary violence. Jim Crow laws were passed in Southern states after slavery was eradicated in order to reduce former slaves - who were theoretically equal citizens now - to a place of subordination. These laws regarding segregation limited almost all civil liberties and political and economic equality. Jim Crow was overturned due to the efforts of the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement. Now that it was illegal to discriminate overtly against blacks, the New Jim Crow system of mass incarceration was born. It was even more sneaky and almost impervious to claims of racism. It disenfranchises and marginalizes people of color just like Jim Crow did, but it's much easier to look the other way or not see the system as racially motivated.

What does Alexander suggest in order to fix the current system?

Alexander states outright that she does not have a specific list of recommendations, and hopes the book will instead spur a conversation. However, she does delve into issues that have to change. The prison system, for one, must not be profit-driven. Law enforcement should not be given so many incentives to racially profile and arrest people. The real facts on drugs and the statistics regarding usage should be acknowledged. Anti-drug legislation like mandatory minimums need to be overturned. Treatment of ex-offenders needs to be softened; more rehabilitation and help must be given. Bias in juries and sentencing must change. And perhaps most importantly, the American people must be honest with themselves about what they've done. In other words, the public consciousness must change; the indifference must go away. American society has a responsibility to confront what we have done and are doing to people of color even if it is uncomfortable to do so.

What powers do the police and prosecutors have, and what is their impact?

Police have almost unfettered power to do whatever they want in the War on Drugs. They choose the neighborhoods to police, harassing the drivers and pedestrians there with abandon. They seize whatever they want and almost none of it ever returns to the people who owned it. They are seen by the courts to know best, even if the statistics (and the people who experience these encounters) do not bear this out. Prosecutors are even more powerful, bringing absurd sentences down on individuals. Together the system is almost impossible to navigate and/or escape. Black people, especially those in urban areas, will no doubt have some encounter with the police and/or prosecutors in their lifetime, even if they've done nothing wrong or something very minor.

Why did black leaders and black communities support the drug war for so long?

This is certainly an uncomfortable fact about the early drug war - black leaders and communities tended to support it. They looked at their crumbling neighborhoods and despaired at the crack epidemic sweeping through them, combining with joblessness to create a hopeless situation. Some hoped that eradicating drugs would improve their communities. As the drug war dragged on, some people thought the best course of action was to cooperate with the police - to be on one's best behavior and help promote the "uplift" of the race. Black leaders also focused their efforts elsewhere, such as on affirmative action. They found it easier to ignore their poorer brethren and fight fights that might be "easier" and perhaps more successful.

What does Alexander think about Obama in terms of his election as well as his actions as president?

Alexander is, of course, pleased with the election of a black president, especially one like the intelligent, honest, and compassionate Obama. She points out that he is an exceptional person, though, and his election is not representative of any true, fundamental progress. Having admitted to doing drugs while young, it is possible that if he had ended up in the system he would not have had the life he did. It seems to be a combination of privilege and luck that he escaped it. Black exceptionalism, which Obama is the poster child for, does not mean that regular black people are doing well. People like Obama and Condoleeza Rice allow whites to point out that things have changed, seemingly shutting down the question of racial progress. In terms of Obama's contributions to fighting the drug war and ending mass incarceration, he has not done so well. Alexander criticizes his support for programs that funnel money to law enforcement and his lack of real action, despite some of the statements he made on the campaign trail. It is also problematic that many blacks do not seem to want to criticize him too much because he is a black man in power and they feel that should be paramount.

The New Jim Crow Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The New Jim Crow is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Find two examples where Alexander introduces the views of others.

Alexander introduces the views of other by including examples of African Americans who were refused the right to vote, or in turn, were faced with barriers to voting such as “poll taxes” or “literacy tests."

2. Explain the closed door metaphor.

Alexander often says things like, "It closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias in sentencing" (111). The metaphor of closed doors is apt because while doors may literally be closed in terms of suits not able to proceed, the image of a...

What central research question does Alexander ask that politicians and scholars have not been able to answer

The main theme of Alexander's work is that the current American system of mass incarceration, created in response to the rise in drug arrests, is a systematic attempt to marginalize people of color much in the same way that the Jim Crow laws...

Study Guide for The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow study guide contains a biography of Michelle Alexander, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The New Jim Crow
• The New Jim Crow Summary
• Character List

Essays for The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

• Structure and Rhetorical Strategy in "The New Jim Crow"
• Rigorous Reasoning
• Mandated Failures
• What Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" Adds to “If Beale Street Could Talk”
• Mass Incarceration Parallels with Jim Crow

Lesson Plan for The New Jim Crow

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The New Jim Crow
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The New Jim Crow Bibliography

Juneteenth, Jim Crow and how the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom

Professor of History, Sam Houston State University

Lecturer, History Department, Sam Houston State University

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The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston .

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston , the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory , the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas .

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword .

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins .

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials , their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan , the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction .

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow , he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation ’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “ the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole .”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

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Fact-checking byron donalds’ ‘jim crow’ comments on black families, conservatism.

• Race and Ethnicity

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., speaks March 3, 2023, at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP)

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump, recently tried to draw Black voters to Trump’s side, but a comparison he made involving the Jim Crow era drew criticism from Democrats.

At a June 4 event in Philadelphia, Donalds compared today’s Black culture with that of the Jim Crow era , when Black people in the South were subject to multiple forms of state-sponsored discrimination. Jim Crow laws were enacted over several decades following the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the late 19th century and formally ended with passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s.

"You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together," Donalds said in a recording published by the Philadelphia Inquirer . "During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively. And then (the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are."

Donalds’ mention of Johnson refers to increased federal efforts to fight poverty, which some conservatives say provided incentives for the breakup of families.

Leading Democrats criticized Donalds’ statement as lionizing the Jim Crow era. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, called out Donalds on the House floor, saying his comparison was a "factually inaccurate statement that Black folks were better off during Jim Crow. That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation."

The Congressional Black Caucus, which consists of House Democrats, demanded that Donalds apologize to Black Americans "for misrepresenting one of the darkest chapters in our history for his own political gain."

Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in May 10 , saying, "It’s sadly yet another example of somebody out of Florida trying to erase or rewrite our true history," referring to a controversy over a proposed rewrite of some Black history standards for middle schools in the state. "I went to Florida last July to call out what they were trying to do to replace our history with lies. And apparently there’s a never ending flow of that coming out of that state."

Donalds defended his comments on MSNBC , saying he was not being "nostalgic" about Jim Crow but was trying to make the narrow point about Black marriage rates and a stronger conservative identity.

During the Jim Crow period, he said, "the marriage rates of Black Americans were significantly higher than any other time since then in American history" and that since then, "they have plummeted."

Some Democratic characterizations of Donalds’ remarks were overbroad. But experts told PolitiFact that Donalds’ remarks about Black Americans’ families and conservative identity were thorny in their own right.

Donalds’ office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

A segregated drinking fountain at the Halifax County Courthouse in North Carolina in April 1938. (Library of Congress, public domain)

Black marriage rates have fallen, but for multiple reasons

There is some statistical evidence to support Donalds’ claim about Black marriage rates being stronger during the Jim Crow era. However, it omits a lot of important context, experts told PolitiFact, including the role of broader social, educational and economic patterns.

The percentage of Black women ages 40 to 44 who were ever married was about 94% in 1930 and remained above 90% through 1970, research by sociologists Kelly Raley of the University of Texas and Megan Sweeney and Danielle Wondra of UCLA shows. Since then, the rate has fallen considerably, to about 63% in 2012. 

The pattern for white women has also fallen, but less dramatically, ending up around 88% in 2012, down from nearly 100% in 1930.

The researchers found a similar pattern of rising divorce rates. "Between 1940 and 1980, both white and Black women experienced large increases in divorce, but the increase occurred sooner and more steeply for Black women," they wrote.

Some conservative commentators have argued that government policies, including safety net programs that make it possible for women to try single-parenthood, are a leading cause of fractured families. 

However, the presence of other factors makes it hard to pinpoint a single cause for this family fracturing. Raley, Sweeney and Wondra cite such factors as "an enormous decline in unskilled manufacturing jobs during the 1970s and 1980s (that) hit Black men particularly hard" and higher rates of death and incarceration among Black men. Another factor is the rising status of women and increased female employment. With women, and especially Black women, often ending up with more education than men , the pool of what the authors call "desirable partners" is constrained.

"Donalds ignores the negative impact of poverty on families and the reduction in Black family poverty produced by civil rights enforcement and social welfare programs," said Dorothy E. Roberts, a University of Pennsylvania law and sociology professor. "Surely, Black families would be stronger if the United States had less structural racism, including lower incarceration rates, and more generous social welfare programs."

Black Americans’ political motivations during Jim Crow are difficult to prove

Donalds’ claim that Black people "voted conservatively" during the Jim Crow era is not possible to prove through hard evidence, experts said.

In the South under Jim Crow, "most Black people could not vote," University of Pennsylvania historian Kathleen M. Brown said. There might be voting records for the fraction of Southern Black people who were able to vote during the decades of Jim Crow laws, but this small group would not represent the views of the entire Southern Black population.

Black Americans did vote in the North during the Jim Crow period, but they were not living under Jim Crow’s legal and social strictures.

Historians said a pattern of Black voters backing Republicans during the Jim Crow era would not support the idea that they were "conservative" in the way that today’s Republican Party is.

In the North, Black people "voted for Republicans as the party of Abraham Lincoln who ‘freed the slaves,’" said Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania historian whom Democratic President Jimmy Carter named to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. 

Black people in the South would have been likely to vote Republican for the same reason if they’d been able, Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar said. 

The Republican Party in that period "tended to be more conservative" on economic regulation while also being seen as "more sympathetic to Black rights," Keyssar said. "Conservatism" as a defined ideological movement emerged in the 1950s, late in the Jim Crow period, historians said.

Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist, said Black voters have historically compartmentalized their views, separating what Donalds might consider their "conservative" perspectives on social issues from their more liberal views on racial issues.

Today, Gillespie said, conservative Black people "are more likely to still vote for and identify with the Democratic Party, despite the fact that liberals of other racial groups would be strongly predicted to be Democrats and conservatives of other backgrounds would be strongly predicted to be Republican. This is because of the Democratic Party’s 60-year issue advantage on questions of race and civil rights."

Our Sources

Philadelphia Inquirer, Rep. Byron Donalds draws backlash for expressing nostalgia for Jim Crow era during Philly event , June 5, 2024 NBC, Rep. Byron Donalds defends comments about Jim Crow , June 6, 2024

The Washington Post, When did black Americans start voting so heavily Democratic? , July 7 , 2015 NPR, Why Did Black Voters Flee The Republican Party In The 1960s? , July 14, 2014 

Kelly Raley, Megan Sweeney, and Danielle Wondra, " The Growing Racial and Ethnic Divide in U.S. Marriage Patterns " (Future Child), Fall 2015 

Email interview with Dorothy E. Roberts, law and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, June 7, 2024

Email interview with Alexander Keyssar, Harvard University historian, June 7, 2024

Email interview with Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania historian, June 7, 2024

Email interview with Mary Frances Berry, University of Pennsylvania historian, June 7, 2024

Email interview with Andra Gillespie, Emory University political scientist, June 10, 2024

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One grandfather's act of resilience in the Jim Crow South

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Nyla Moxley 's grandfather grew up in a segregated America and endured racism in the Jim Crow South . He and Moxley reflect on his resilience and what it's taught her as a young Black woman today.

This audio essay was produced by KUOW's RadioActive Youth Media.

This segment aired on June 19, 2024.

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