Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness > Status Update

Malcolm X understood that the United States was created by and for privileged white men. It was white men who dominated politics, controlled the nation’s wealth, and wrote the rules by which everyone else was forced to live.

This is where black exceptionalism comes in. Highly visible examples of Black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness.

For example, advocates are frequently asked, when will we (finally) become a colorblind society? The pursuit of colorblindness makes people impatient. With courage, we should respond: Hopefully never.

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 cast system, not simply good behavior.

“Sadly, like the racial caste systems that preceded it, the system of mass incarceration now seems normal and natural to most, a regrettable necessity.”

“This extraordinary circumstance - unheard of in the rest of the world - is treated here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains were just a half a century ago.”

Remarkably, it is not uncommon today to hear media pundits, politicians, social critics, and celebrities-most notably Bill Cosby-complain that the biggest problem black men have today is that they "have no shame."

"In the drug war, police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities)."

"In the drug war, police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities)."