THE NEW JIM CROW
Called “the bible of a social movement” and winner of numerous awards, The New Jim Crow has inspired a generation of activists to push for racial justice since its publication one decade ago. This year, in the book’s 10th anniversary’s edition, author Michelle Alexander returns to reflect on how the criminal justice system has evolved since.
I picked up this book in light of this year’s protests and conversations on race — and I’m so glad I did. It exposed realities I was blind to, because of who I am, the skin I am in, and the experiences which that engenders. The New Jim Crow is heavy, dense, and will remain relevant for a very long time.
This year’s Black Lives Matter movement and the brutal killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked nationwide protests and ongoing conversations on race and police brutality. In a NYT op-ed piece in June, Alexander asks us again what she called for in the book’s preface: an earnest push for racial justice reform, now more urgent than ever.
Her opinion piece comes the same year as the book’s 10th anniversary, feeling very nearly like a timely afterword. The New Jim Crow is heavy. It’s brutally honest and exacting in discernment. What follows is a broad overview of The New Jim Crow.
Alexander’s central argument is that America operates and has always operated under a racial caste system which has endured because of its constant shapeshifting to fit the cultural status quo of its time. For each major period in American history, some form of racial caste has endured, taking on a new design less conspicuous than its predecessor. Today’s environment is no different. In what Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, the criminal justice system in America today binds its population in a racial caste, oppressing the liberties of African American men while confining them to second class citizenship.
“We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Despite previous social reforms, including the Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s, widespread oppression continues. More contemporary models of racial caste are the hardest to dismantle, becoming virtually inextricable with politics, education, housing and employment opportunities. Ultimately, unless a resurrection of serious upheaval of the current system’s design takes over, racial injustice will persist indefinitely.
CASTE TRACED BACK TO THE BIRTH OF SLAVERY
The book explores a wide-eye view of how a caste system could survive in a ‘free nation’ like America. Alexander starts from before America even became a sovereign nation in 1776, when European settlers brought African slaves across the Atlantic. A race-based system, African enslavement gave birth to a legacy of racism while creating the blueprint for institutionalized racism to later models. Exploiting black labor and actively suppressing the civil liberties of black Americans exists in every caste “system”. It would take until the 14th Amendment in 1868 for Black Americans to be granted full citizenship.
Slavery was not entirely unique to America. By the time African populations were brought to the West, slavery already existed in various regions throughout. Yet the enslavement of Africans in America was the most expansive of any period of slavery the world had ever seen. As European settlers made their way onto American land, claiming territory to farm on, they needed huge amounts of labor. The Native American population was a consideration but it became clear that they posed a threat and were ready to fight back. Europeans could hardly volunteer laborers of their own — it demoralized campaigns recruiting for volunteers to settle onto the “Promise Land”, and there were already few in number. By contrast, Africa had a population that appealed to the interests of white settlers: sizable, accessible, and vulnerable. Africans brought in for slave labor often did not know English, which alleviated Europeans from any threats to unionize and fight back. African laborers became the standard and were brought in by the millions over hundreds of years.
Whether it was because settlers discovered the southern regions before going north or west, or because the land was more fertile for farming in the south than other parts, slavery took its root in the deep south. As more and more settlers flooded new land, business would pick up. Demand for cash crops, and in turn, demand for labor increased. Sugar and cotton plantations grew sizably. More and more bodies were put on fields.
FORMING THE RACE-BASED HIERARCHY
This is when we see a clear distinction of class hierarchy, and ultimately a racial caste system, born out of slavery. Before the 17th century, American plantations profited from both indentured servitude and slave labor from the poor white class and black slaves. But political events like Bacon’s rebellion destroyed that model, ultimately relying more heavily on black slaves versus white indentured servants. Alexander asserts that these events had a crucial role in defining a hierarchy based exclusively on race — a concept that is a relatively recent development.
The consensus about what happened in that period of time is loosely the following. At the time, threats of Indian raids loomed high. Militia leader Nathaniel Bacon responded by appealing to the governor of Virginia, asking for military support, which was denied. Bacon rebelled, amassing support from both black and white groups, which ultimately threatened the elite white. Whites in power feared the potential danger of ‘their own people’ turning against them, and so essentially began the class separation between all whites and all blacks. White leadership set to drive a wedge between even the poorest whites, which had been on equal footing with black laborers. New laws were passed in response to Bacon’s rebellion asserting that black people came with ‘hereditary slavery’, effectively reducing white indentured servitude on plantations. This particular rebellion and its white backlash is historically significant as it’s thought to have really commenced the racial distinctions which defined the colonies and the United States since.
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
Alexander shows how between each model of caste, there is a temporary period of chaotic transition as those in power struggle to maintain their power in a new model. For instance, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1863, Southern slaveholders were outraged and faced with a devastated economy. Business had been entirely dependent on bodies working on southern plantations for free, day in and day out. The Civil War left the southern economy in shambles, destroying land and leaving state governments in debt.
Two years later, the 13th amendment abolishes slavery (with the exception of using slavery as punishment for a crime). The official Reconstruction Era, dating from roughly 1863–1877 is a period where minor “alleviation” emerges, in the form of brief political mobilization of African Americans. They exercised their right vote and held positions in office. But ambitions to equalize populations didn’t last long: the Reconstruction Era was a transition period in which those in power considered a new racial order. A backlash against African Americans ensued.
Southerners feared the possibility of black empowerment and felt a revolt was imminent. To keep their economy going as it was before the new legislation, the Southern elite set up “black codes”, laws that could easily incriminate Blacks. They understood the level of power they wielded over the population, exploiting it with laws of their own, which essentially trapped Blacks into the penal system. Once incarcerated, African Americans were faced with fees and punishments they could ‘work off’ with free labor. Slavery is reinstated, hence, slavery by another name.
ONE SYSTEM GIVES WAY TO ANOTHER
The Redeeming Era years was a period plagued by white terror that Black men would revolt and threaten white man’s political, social, and economic dominance. This narrative has persisted across centuries and is found even in recent political rhetoric, where campaigns are predicated on the need to ‘put Blacks in their place’. Time and again, we see social systems rising as a result of fear and power-hungry motives, a desperate attempt of those in authoritative positions to cling to their power and status. Central to Alexander’s point is that as time passes, these systems go from tangible and obvious to something increasingly harder to detect and dismantle. In the beginning there was slavery, an obvious institution visible to the public eye. But when legislation eventually abolished it, another system took over: segregation. This new system functioned identically as its predecessor, but stayed within the legal confines of its particular time. Slavery was illegal; segregation was not. Eventually, when race-based segregation became outlawed, those in power unearthed a new legal way to maintain racial oppression and cling to their status.
Jim Crow is that new racial caste system after slavery, a hierarchy emerged, “due to efforts by white elite to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people.” It is a time in which stringent laws discriminating against Blacks proliferate, extending across different social spheres: in public schools, jobs, housing, restaurants. The new social order had taken root.
When the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s emerged, segregation began to shudder. Still, remnants of segregation remained: there was little chance to rise socioeconomically for African Americans and access to equal employment opportunities faltered. Throughout all this is the gradual awakening of Black empowerment, coalescing formally into the Civil Rights movement. Whites occupying powerful positions in government had to reconsider how to respond at a time when more and more people, Black and white alike, were demanding social change and an end to racial injustice.
This is exactly the time when political rhetoric pivots significantly, targeting African Americans in a newly racist context. The new way to talk about race without being explicit was to bring up crime. Presidential would-be’s campaigned around getting tougher on crime, promising to rectify the safety of the American people, while targeting the male African American population as the sole perpetrator of that danger. It’s a revolutionary, dangerous period in American history in which deliberate attempts to mold the public perception is harnessed through specific political rhetoric. The way there was straightforward: gain supporters by fabricating an enemy for your potential followers to despise.
From this standpoint, we see the myth of the dangerous black man perpetuated. Some campaigns claimed that affording Blacks equal employment opportunity would chip away at the same jobs that poor whites had to “fight so hard for in the first place,’ driving a wedge between races. African Americans were implicitly, whether through rhetoric or discriminating laws, depicted as lazy and inherently lack any work ethic. The problem was inarguably “inherent.” (Rhetoric echoing similar notions in the Redemption period.) Nothing “could be worse” than to surrender a good job to some undeserving worker. Of course, one of the functions of a racially segregated society is to maintain the perception that the oppressed group deserves its oppression, absolving itself of any moral responsibility while ensuring its basic structure endures.
An interesting pivot to the political rhetoric of the time occurs during Reagan’s presidency:
“Regan mastered the ‘excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse.”
Colorblind language would make it nearly impossible to prove racist intent in the absence of explicitly racist language. Here’s where something similar to the evolution of racist institutions follows: overt, explicit racism gives way to implicit bias. Racist intent becomes harder to prove. In his campaign for Presidency, Reagan fell back on oft-told anecdotes of “welfare queens” and criminals whose “face belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.” He extends Nixon’s War on Drugs throughout the ‘80’s, cracking down on crime.
Bearing all of this in mind, it’s apparent that there is an undeniable string threading through and between each racist system: from chattel slavery to Jim Crow to 20th century politics to the War on Drugs to today’s mass incarceration issue. To quote the author, “We have not abolished slavery but merely redesigned it.”
The next half of her book Alexander spends detailing how today’s mass incarceration system performs as a racial caste.
RACIAL CASTE IN TODAY’S AMERICA
The caste conditions of today is supported and maintained by its own criminal justice system: everything from over-policing Black neighborhoods to stigmatizing ex-con’s and treating them as second class citizens long after they’ve left jail. Alexander goes into depth on what parts of the system serve to ensure its perpetuity. She points to the following:
-Over-policing neighborhoods: Inner city neighborhoods have been the central focus of most targeted policing efforts. SWAT teams come in regularly busting through doors; applying no-knock warrants, buy-and-bust operations, stop-and-frisk, pretext, etc. Within inner-city areas, the drug war has waged with the greatest ferocity.
-Pre-text: Officers are within their rights when using any traffic excuse to stop someone when they’re actually searching for drugs. They can ask to search the vehicle even if the driver made a minor traffic violation: failing to use turn signals, not stopping long enough at a stop sign, speeding off at a stop sign, etc. Possibilities for infraction abound. Courts decided the officer’s true ‘intention’ is irrelevant under Pretext: if they have a legitimate reason to detain the driver, no matter how small the violation, the officer is within their rights when they ask to search the vehicle. This enables searches to be conducted on mere hunches. Without question, Black Americans are detained more for minor traffic violations than whites.
-”Reason for suspicion”: This grants officers the freedom to stop and search anybody who is remotely suspicious to them. Inevitably, officers become free to apply their own subjective biases and prejudices in selecting who to stop because they appear suspicious. Profiling begins from even before an officer starts working, where in an officer’s training, they are trained to ‘look for’ certain cues where most often, race is used as reason to suspect.
-Unfair Legal Representation: Most people charged with an offense do not undergo a full trial, in fact, doing so would overload the system the way it is designed. If they do get a lawyer, oftentimes the lawyer is short for time or doesn’t care enough about the case to pursue fair sentencing. Fair representation is also very expensive.
-Almighty Prosecutors: The prosecutor is said to hold the most power in the courtroom: they are free to dismiss cases for any or no reason at all, and can load up defendants with endless charges at their own discretion. As long as probable cause is in the prosecutor’s favor, they can charge defendants- including with crimes they are not guilty of committing. Coupled with unfair legal representation, the person in handcuffs is on an uphill battle full of fees, long sentences, strict parole terms and little resources after their release.
-Strict Parole Terms: Parole terms are often tight and stringent, making it incredibly easy to violate parole. Any degree of violation, small or large, often warrants going back to jail. This is how many people in jail are faced with doing more time.
-”Life” after Serving Time: Punishment doesn’t end after prisoners have served their time. Discrimination against housing, loans, and education abound, barring those who’ve spent time in jail from having equal access. Other rights taken away is the right to vote, sometimes up to 12 years depending on what state the person live in, and zero chance of ever being on a jury. When life gets this difficult, people seek alternative ways of making money. If it’s illicit and that person gets caught by law enforcement, their cycle continues. The system is reinforced. You’re not taken care of after you’ve served time, the system doesn’t care about you.
-Right to Give Consent: Police officers can only conduct searches when the person of interest gives the officer their consent. Many people do not know that they are in control of giving that consent. Police officers will rarely inform the subject that they’re in their rights if they deny a search and sometimes rely on tactics that will trick the POI into consenting. Asking, “Can I talk to you?” as a way to secure consent and move forward with the search.
-Civil Asset Forfeiture: Known in many circles as ‘policing for profit’, civil forfeiture gives police the power to seize any assets related to people suspected with a crime. Note that this does not require conviction or proof of crime. Officers are within their rights when they show up, (even if it comes off a tip from somebody with bad intentions) at your property and take away your possessions. Houses, cars, anything is liable to get taken away.
TAKE-AWAYS
These are just a few of the issues plaguing today’s mass incarceration system, but they are significant and enormously powerful. All combined, it serves to perpetuate and protect an institution that is inherently discriminatory.
As for my personal experience with The New Jim Crow, Alexander’s research opened my eyes to the reality of today’s criminal justice system. The ugly underbelly of a long-held institution is fiercely questioned and exposed with a relentless, scrupulous eye — something regular Americans have failed to do but are equipped in doing. I can’t imagine anyone walking away after a book like this without ‘knowing better’. Read it.
