Life After 'The New Jim Crow'
http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/09/life-after-the-new-jim-crow/502472/
When Michelle Alexander released her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in 2010, she had a difficult time getting anyone to pay attention to it. The U.S. was still relishing a bit in the euphoria of the possibilities of a post-racial milieu following the election of its first African-American president. Ferguson and Charleston hadn’t happened yet, and there was little public discourse about the historical legacies of debtors prisons, lynchings, and Confederate monuments. President Obama was such a shining (if blinding) symbol of how far America had come, that few had an appetite for discourse on America’s abysmal record of incarcerating African Americans.
But then came the execution of Troy Davis in 2011—a death penalty case out of Georgia that raised significant questions about how fair the criminal justice system is for African Americans and the poor. The New Jim Crow suddenly started enjoying wider circulation, thanks to its exhaustive look at the ways in which black lives have been devastated, disenfranchised, and disappeared by the American criminal justice system. The book was re-released in 2012 and it became a certified hit, topping almost every best-seller list and winning numerous awards.
Today, one would have to go well out of their way to avoid a conversation about the racial disparities inherent to the U.S. criminal justice system. Ta-Nehisi’s Coates tremendous journalistic feat on mass incarceration builds upon Alexander’s New Jim Crow foundation. She will also be featured in an upcoming documentary from the acclaimed director Ava DuVernay, 13th, about the over-criminalization of African Americans. Alexander was just awarded the Heinz Award, a $250,000 grant given for groundbreaking work that shifts the public’s understanding of important issues. For Alexander, this sort of recognition was unforeseeable when the book was first released, in what seems like six long years ago....
I don’t view mass incarceration as just a problem of politics or policy, I view it as a profound moral and spiritual crisis as well. I think that racial justice in this country will remain a distant dream as long as we think that it can be achieved simply through rational policy discussions. If we take a purely technocratic approach to these issues and strip them of their moral and spiritual dimensions, I think we’ll just keep tinkering and tinkering and fail to realize that all of these issues really have more to do with who we are individually and collectively, and what we believe we owe one another, and how we ought to treat one another as human beings.