Book Review…Explosive book on race and incarceration reverberates beyond US

Mar 30, 2014 News

Book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander(
Dr Glenville Ashby, Reviewer

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is an explosive historical and contemporary commentary on society, politics, and the judicial process that impact African Americans, particularly young black men. Alexander is an attorney who has offered a scholarly and thoroughly researched oeuvre that will serve as a sound pedagogical tool while rattling the foundation of US society.

The book cover of Jim Crow

She does not labour on the aftermath of slavery and the dehumanization and terror of Jim Crow laws. That was decades ago — “down South,” as they say. Alexander is judicious in not making this a historical review. What she does, however, is chronicle a systematic assault of the legal system against black men. She argues that Jim Crow laws have been reconfigured and made more palatable; their racist underbelly subtly disguised. They have now resurfaced under political slogans, such as, “War on Drugs.” Or even more poignantly, “War on young black men.”
Alexander goes further. She asserts that America’s mass incarceration of black males has created a new caste that has marginalised and shut them out of the political, economic and social system years after their release. But why the disproportionate percentage of incarcerated blacks when statistics confirm the prevalent use of drugs among whites? The answer is troubling!
Her thesis is unyielding as she rails against “stop and frisk” police procedures that occur daily in poor neighbourhoods, although that practice violates the fourth amendment. She also questions the militarisation of police powers and tactics (a perversion of the Comitatus Act).
Alexander is anecdotal at times, if only to cement her position. She describes a New York City SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team storming into fifty-seven-year-old Alberta Spruill’s apartment with flash bang grenades. No drugs or arrests, and no indictments; just a dead occupant from cardiac arrest.
She further argues that due process under the law is perverted with mass plea bargains and the absence of “full blown trials of guilt or innocence.”
The author cites a report from the popular weekly, Village Voice, on hearings by Manhattan Borough president C Virginia Fields on SWAT: “Dozens of black and Latino victims—nurses, secretaries, and former officers—packed her chambers airing tales, one more horrifying than the next…They describe police ransacking their homes, handcuffing children and grandparents, putting guns to their head and being verbally abusive.”
We get the picture. But the author has to connect the dots and prove that a definitive agenda exists to corral and control young black men under the guise of law and order. More so, she has to show that the overall aim is to derail blacks when they have begun to thrive socially and politically.
It is a painstaking task, but Alexander is poised and compellingly convincing. She follows a damning trail that begins with slavery, meanders through Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights periods, and up to the present era. And what we learn is disturbing. “Law and order” is really a racist code that has surfaced, then submerged, only to resurface, depending on racial and political sentiments. Society’s problems always seem to germinate with blacks.
Alexander quotes the late senator, Robert Byrd: “If blacks conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality.”
It is a toxic statement that many have embraced throughout history. Yes, one can be dismissive of Alexander’s thesis, and she predicts that much in her introduction. But the facts bear out her argument. Neither Democrat nor Republican is spared by Alexander’s pen. She questions the timing of Reagan’s War on Drugs policy, with a reference to the sudden proliferation of crack cocaine in black neighbourhoods in the 80s. Law and Order are the magic words today, as they were for the virulent KKK organisation, that, in 1990 announced its intention to “join the battle against illegal drugs,” by becoming the “eyes and ears of the police.”
Alexander, in timely fashion dons sociological lens, explaining intra-racial violence besetting inner cities. Poor education, deindustrialisation, rampant unemployment, she posits, are the causative factors behind this violence.
Unfortunately, Alexander’s scholastic rigour may be insufficient to quell her detractors. Systemic racism has always fueled support for “get tough on crime” agendas while throwing effective political ideas and leadership out the window. And what of the historic ascendance to the nation’s highest office by a black man? Alexander is hardly impressed. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Publisher: The New Press, New York, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59558-10
Available: Amazon.com
Rating: Essential