I finished listening to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander today. The sixteen-hour audiobook took me a few weeks to get through (mostly thanks to me slacking on my normal running routine where I listen to the majority of my audiobooks), but I’m glad I started with this one as I sort through the wave of anti-racism book recommendations. My friend Jenna had said this was a game-changer for her when I showed her a few options for my book club at work, and it really is.
I admit I knew very little about our prison system beyond some general assumptions that it was broken and disproportionately impacted people of color. I knew next to nothing about the “war on drugs” other than what the name implied the relatively few times I’ve heard the phrase in my life. The more I learn about how we (white America) have designed systems of control from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration on purpose, and have used the guise of colorblindness to stay at best apathetic and at worst destroy Black lives, the more it crystalizes for me that I (we) need to actively fight for change.
Here’s a quote from the book that I think nicely summarizes its thesis:
“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
I highly recommend this book (I know my mom is already listening to it as well). I’m going to continue to incorporate anti-racist literature into my regular reading and I’m excited to talk about this one with my book club next month.
With Love,
Natalie