The New Jim Crow Quotes

… The aim is to reduce the jail population to save money. One need not be formally convicted in a court of law to be subject to this shame and stigma. The New Jim Crow Quotes Showing 1-30 of 1, 241. "Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs. But I know that Dr. King, and Ella Baker, and Sojourner Truth, and so many other freedom fighters, who risked their lives to end the old caste systems, would not be so easily deterred. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. My elation would have been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised land of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely similar to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast. We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. "The rhetoric of 'law and order' was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. You're likely to attend schools that have zero-tolerance policies, perhaps where police officers patrol the halls rather than security guards, where disputes with teachers are treated as criminal infractions, where a schoolyard fight results in your first arrest rather than a meeting with the principal and your parents.

The New Jim Crow Definition

These The New Jim Crow quotes discuss the War on Drugs, jailing, and the impacts of mass incarceration. So in honor of Dr. King, and all those who labored to bring and end to the old Jim Crow, I hope we will build together a human rights movement to end mass incarceration. For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr. 's philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4. As an African American woman, with three young children who will never know a world in which a black man could not be president of the United States, I was beyond thrilled on election night. But lets thank Professor Alexander. For it has been the refusal and failure to recognize the dignity and humanity of all people that has been the sturdy foundation of every caste system that has ever existed in the United States, or anywhere else in the world. One of the main themes of the book is how even though the overt racial hostility of the Jim Crow era no longer really exists, the indifference, apathy, and denial of the American people regarding the treatment of the black members of their country are absolutely sufficient to prop up the system of marginalization. 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. " Carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable. 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. … Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. But the reality is that today there are more African Americans under correctional control in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the civil war began. Accompanying this legal exile from mainstream society is a profound sense of shame and isolation.

"As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them. The New Jim Crow Questions and Answers. Though the drug war is carried out in an officially colorblind way, race is a huge component.

The New Jim Crow Quotes Car

Just today, the New York Times reported that more than half of the African Americans in New York City are jobless. Committed to shaking the foundations of systems of inequality, systems of division, systems that cause unnecessary suffering and despair. Those prisons would have to close down. 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. Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? So many of us, even of those of us who claim to care, and who have been committed for a long, long time to social justice have, in my view, been sleep walking for the last couple of decades. Michelle Alexander: "A System of Racial and Social Control". Renews March 20, 2023.

Coded racial messages became the staple of the Republican strategy in the coming decades. Getting out of prison often means a life of barely surviving, and the return to crime is very common. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of "us. " Though there may be a few bad actors in the present, for the most part, racism is an ugly vestige of our great nation's history, not its present. So we've decimated these communities, and we've destroyed all hopes of anything like the American dream.

The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander Quotes

… What effect does locking up so many people from one concentrated neighborhood have on that neighborhood? There] seems to be something almost counterintuitive going on here, that once you start locking up too many people, you can actually start to destroy the social fabric of a community to the point where it creates the conditions for crime rather than prevents crime, which one would assume was in some people's minds the point of incarceration. But that's just the way that it is. We're constantly being told there's not enough funds to pay good teachers, there's not enough funds for this, there's not enough funds for that.

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. Only after years of working on criminal justice reform did my own focus finally shift, and then the rigid caste system slowly came into view. We've yet to end the drug war, end all these forms of discrimination against people, whether they are immigrants, or whether they have been branded criminals because of some mistakes they have made in their past. This time the drug war is the system of control. Starting in the 60s with Barry Goldwater and rising with Nixon, there was deliberate maneuvering by politicians to subtly exploit the vulnerabilities of Southern whites, who were concerned with the Civil Rights campaign. White people must be included in black movements to create an economic and class-based coalition based on all human rights.

The New Jim Crow Quotes With Page Number

Convicted felons are denied access to housing, food stamps, and other public benefits. This quote sums up Alexander's core argument: the way ex-offenders are treated today is just as bad if not worse than the way a black person was treated in the South under Jim Crow. They are also likely to go back to jail because they were doing something criminal in order to survive and take care of their families. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape. Rather, the system has created a public consensus image of criminals as being black males, and people cannot acting along subconscious biases. They have no reason to believe otherwise. Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. It goes on and on, and every day people are arrested for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then locked away and then relegated to permanent second-class status. In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. What forms of violence have actually been perpetrated by us, the state, the government, us collectively, upon them?

It affects people emotionally. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. We have got to be willing to say out loud that we, as a nation, have managed to rebirth a caste-like system in America. And then, finally, he becomes enraged, and he says, "What's to become of me?

You, one way or another, are going to jail. I was familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in which racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence of differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe, innate ability. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination—i. So I believe we have got to be willing to pick up where they left off, and do the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors. "Michelle Alexander's brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. On the war on drugs — and federal incentives given out through the war on drugs — as the primary causes of the prison explosion in the United States. Why might police be more likely to target people of color? Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. So, the hope Alexander finds is in the next generation of organizers and activists who may, with clear vision, still find a new way forward. The vested interests of many parties in the continuation of this current caste system is powerful.
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