The New Jim Crow Discussion - Introduction

[Carly]

Hi guys!

Has everyone been able to read the introduction to The New Jim Crow yet? Even if you haven't, I'd like to start off the (lengthy...oops) discussion here with a few things that stood out to me.

The intro is brimming with insight already and effectively sets out what Alexander will be talking about throughout the rest of the book. There's a lot we could talk about, so I'll just pick a few topics, and feel free to comment and further the discussion or choose topics of your own.

A) This probably shouldn't surprise me, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I read (p. 5), "...there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of L.A. and later emerged in cities across the country. The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war."

Alexander goes on to reveal that the CIA admitted to allowing drugs to come into the country during this because it funded their covert war in Nicaragua. I suspect she will go into much more detail in later chapters. These facts dispel a major assumption I had that the Drug War was nothing but a reasonable response, if eventually hugely overwrought, to a fear that drugs were ravaging communities across the nation. The President announced the war on drugs when drug use was actually on the decline. What does that mean?

To me, it seems like an effort to inspire fear in Americans as a way to control them more effectively. To launch a rather arbitrary campaign, one whose central premise isn't too controversial, i.e. "drugs are bad", to bolster his image. I suppose Alexander will address the belief that he did it specifically to target communities of color, but at this point I'm still holding on to my perhaps ignorant hope that an entire government couldn't be that complicit in evil. What do you think?

B) Alexander lightly touches on something I've been musing over for a while, which is at the core of everything she has discussed so far. We have here stark, moving facts about racial discrimination and disparity in America, and when I see those, my mind tends to want to get to the absolute bottom of them, i.e. the internal struggle for significance that sparks both the desire to oppress and the fight to get out from under oppression. On p.17, she says something that I imagine to be the crux of this entire New Jim Crow idea:

"The criminalization and demonization of black men has turned the black community against itself, unraveling community and family relationships, decimating networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and self-hate experienced by the current pariah caste."

I believe that shame and self-hate, as well as our universal need for individual significance, are at the core of society's issues and are manipulated and exacerbated by American ideology and systems of control. For politicians, having the power to control other humans en masse, i.e. in our current mass incarceration scheme, is a huge ego boost. It makes them feel significant. This works especially well when a whole sector of the population is demonized in the process, as seeing other people drowning in the ocean allows those who catalyzed it to savor their own shore. This is also a huge factor in the racial indifference experienced by the American population as a whole. If white people are honest with ourselves, racial injustice works in our favor. We are significant by default, and in order for us to fight meaningfully for racial justice, we must address our own shame and significance issues first, because that's where all of this begins.

In this same vein, we can't be surprised when someone commits another crime after being released from jail. If you strip that person of most of their rights, as Alexander explains, what choice does he now have to feel significant? He can't do it by making money, legally, as he will find it nearly impossible to find a job. He will find it difficult to own his own home. He can't feel significant by gaining a position of power, say in public office, as no one will vote for someone with a criminal record; the stigma is too great. He can't even be on the jury. He can't even get food stamps. He can't even get people to look him in the eye when they hear he's been labelled a criminal. You've not only taken away his rights, you've taken away his ability to access his own humanity, to feel significant as every human needs to feel. But there is a significance in a life of crime. If you've ever held a gun in your hand, you know how powerful it feels. Instant significance (all our movies tell us this, by the way. The taking up of violence is just a mirror being shown to how America operates as a whole). Throwing your hat into the drug ring allows you a semblance of economic mobility, i.e. significance, as well. Or maybe you just feel the need to steal food because you can't garner the resources to buy it anymore. In that case, you're fighting for the most basic kind of significance - dignity, survival.

The criminal justice systems seems to me a cycle that destroys our inherent humanity, which is why it doesn't work, and how it seems to operate so effectively on the basis of race (you can feel significant by destroying other people's significance). People have to strive to be human; it's in our nature. When we create systems that disregard or destroy that, we have become hopeless, and I fear that's where we are now.