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

by Michelle Alexander

The fact that many African Americans endorse aspects of the current caste system and insist that the problems of the urban poor can be best explained by their behavior, culture, and attitude does not, in any meaningful way, distinguish mass incarceration from its predecessors. To the contrary, these attitudes and arguments have their roots in the struggles to end slavery and Jim Crow. Many African Americans today believe that uplift ideology worked in the past and ought to work again—forgetting that ultimately it took a major movement to end the last caste system, not simply good behavior. Many black people are confused—and the black community itself is divided—about how best to understand and respond to mass incarceration. A seemingly colorblind system has emerged that locks millions of African Americans into a permanent undercaste,