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Essay: Michelle Alexander: Colorblindness & Mass Incarceration Exposed in "The New Jim Crow" Book

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  • Subject area(s): Essay examples
  • Reading time: 3 minutes
  • Price: Free download
  • Published: 25 February 2023*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 727 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 3 (approx)
  • Tags: Essays on racism

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Michelle Alexander is an exceptionally praised social liberties legal advisor, advocate, and lawful researcher. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander talks about the legitimate frameworks that appear to carry out their occupations flawlessly well, yet have in reality, quite recently supplanted one racial standing framework with another one. She illustrates the new Jim Crow and how it works on the society we live in. She utilizes pictures that influence you to cringe however in the meantime convinces you that it is in reality all obvious.

In the book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander clarifies that since the Jim Crow laws that legitimized segregation have finally ended,  a new types of a racial caste s system have been developed over the time. Alexander makes a point to clear up that she doesn't think the similitudes between Jim Crow and the New Crow are absolute. "What has changed since the crumple of Jim Crow has less to do with the fundamental structure of our general public than with the dialect we use to legitimize it. In the time of colorblindness, it is not any more socially passable to utilize race, expressly, as a justification for segregation, avoidance, and social scorn. So we don't. Instead of straightforwardly depend on race, we utilize the criminal justice system to mark ethnic minorities "hoodlums" and after that take part in every one of the practices we as far as anyone knows abandoned."

Alexander starts the book with the narrative of a man named Jarvis Cotton. Cotton is an African American man who was incarcerated at some point in his life and is currently prohibited to vote. All through US history, African American men have been stripped of their natural conceived rights. She talks about how Cotton's dad, his' dad and the majority of his precursors have been not able exercise their naturally conceived rights; rights they merit as men, yet just for various reasons. For instance, his great granddad had been a slave in the South and his granddad and dad were intimidated and influence not to vote by the Ku Klux Klan. Voting is one of the many rights that African American individuals have not had on account of the color of their skin.

Many generalizations that were conceived in the age of the Jim Crow are as yet alive and flourishing right up until the present time. For instance, Alexander expressed, "The racial inclination innate in the drug war is a noteworthy reason that 1 in each 14 black man was in a correctional facility in 2006, contrasted and 1 in each 106 white man". This is a stunning measurement. Where are the purported race neutral laws that we, as Americans, believe that we have? Where is the supposed "colorblind" legal framework? Alexander argues that these as a whole are just myths.

Alexander then compares a free criminal and a liberated slave. At the point when detainees are let free, they have next to no cash and regularly no where to rest. "Detainees returning quote on quote home, are normally the poorest of poor people, without the capacity to pay for private lodging, and are routinely denied open lodging assistance, the sort of help which could give some genuinely necessary security in their lives. For them "going home" is more a different method of expression than a practical alternative. Beside figuring out where to rest, nothing is more troubling for individuals trying to forget jail time than figuring where to work."   Alexander then goes ahead to explain the "birdcage" which is an allegory used to clarify the life of ex-cons and parolees. This illustration goes to paint a picture of how despite the fact that they are out of prison, they are still rejected from society and seen as low class citizens.

In the final chapter, Alexander explains that Civil Right organizations no longer aim their focus in mass incarceration, due to the fact that its never going to change. Alexander believes and reiterates on multiple occasion in the book that racism and prejudice is always going to be around, so for minorities, mass incarceration is always going to be a problem. Instead Civil Right  organization want to focus on single affirmative action cases to try and spread light to public in attempts to fight the injustice.

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