The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
5/5
The New Press 336 pages January 7, 2020
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."
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Jim's Review
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Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and a former clerk for Justice Blackmun, and the book has the precision of legal scholarship and the urgency of a call to action. Her core argument — that mass incarceration functions as a racial caste system as durable as Jim Crow — was contested when the book came out in 2010 and is now mainstream in the academy. Read it for the data on sentencing disparities, the architecture of the War on Drugs, and the legal mechanisms (Whren, McCleskey, Gates) that made the current system possible. Five worms. Dense in places but worth every page.
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