Here are some excerpts from an incredible podcast/interview with Michelle Alexander on Political Affairs. Michelle Alexander is a professor at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, and previously held a position as the Director of Stanford Law School’s Civil Rights Clinic. She also worked as the Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. She’s come out with a new book about race and mass incarceration. Check out the following quotations:
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. There are more African Americans disenfranchised today than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
In major American cities today, cities like Chicago, the majority of working age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to public education, and food stamps. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon. So really quite belatedly I came to see that despite all the fanfare over the election of Barack Obama and our so-called color blind society, we have not ended racial caste in America – we’ve merely redesigned it…
Here’s another powerful excerpt:
Then, of course, there is the stigma as well. In many respects the stigma of being branded a criminal or a felon is as severe and damaging as the stigma of race during the Jim Crow era. Many people branded felons try to pass. During the Jim Crow area, light-skinned Blacks would try to pass as white to avoid the shame and stigma associated with race and all the forms of discrimination associated with race. Today people branded felons try to pass, not just by lying to employers or housing officials, or failing to check the box on loan applications, but by lying to their friends, family members and co-workers, trying to hide their criminal status because of the shame and stigma of having to admit, “Yeah, I did time, I was in prison for 5 years.” So this shame and stigma has created a real silence even in the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration, one that makes political action, collective political action to resist this new system of control, extremely difficult if not impossible.
And finally:
The problem isn’t seeing race, it’s failing to care as much for people of another race as we care for our own, and that, I believe, that failure to care, the indifference to the experience of people of other races, is what lies at the foundation of every caste system that has ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke frequently about this, particularly near the end of his life, where he would remind audiences that slavery and Jim Crow were not systems supported primarily by racial hostility or open bigotry. Rather those systems emerged and endured because of so much indifference, so much indifference by most to the plight of people who were perceived as different, perceived as being fundamentally different than themselves. Colorblindness really is our enemy, and that we as a nation would be much better off if we openly talked about race, openly acknowledged race, and really strove to care more for people of other races.
I would highly encourage anyone interested in the topic of race and criminal justice to read the entire interview, which you will find here at Political Affairs. Her interview is so eloquent and well-worded that I really have nothing to add (from my paltry knowledge of the justice system!). Also be sure to check out the website highlighting her new book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” It looks like it will be a fascinating and compelling read.
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