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

by Michelle Alexander

We’ve learned how to develop powerful surveillance systems and how to build missiles that can reach halfway around the globe. But what have we learned about the true meaning of justice?

After the death of slavery, the idea of race lived on.

The new racial order, known as Jim Crow—a term apparently derived from a minstrel show character—was regarded as the “final settlement,” the “return to sanity,” and “the permanent system.”

Cities like Philadelphia and Rochester were described as being victims of their own generosity.

Numerous paths were available to our nation in the wake of the crack crisis, yet for reasons traceable largely to racial politics and fear mongering, we chose war.

The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.

Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs—and some initially opposed it—but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner?

The disproportionate imprisonment of people of color was, in part, a product of racial profiling—not a justification for

Rather than shaming and condemning an already deeply stigmatized group, we, collectively, can embrace them—not necessarily their behavior, but them—their humanness.

In short, the inclusion of some whites in the system of control is essential to preserving the image of a colorblind criminal justice system and maintaining our self-image as fair and unbiased people.

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary.

Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time.

The topic of the conversation should be how “us” can come to include “all of us.”

If Martin Luther King Jr. was right that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, a new movement will arise; and if civil rights organizations fail to keep up with the times, they will be pushed to the side as another generation of advocates comes to the fore. Hopefully the new generation will be led by those who know best the brutality of the new caste system—a group with greater vision, courage, and determination than the old guard can muster, trapped as they may be in an outdated paradigm.