Michelle Alexander is the former director of the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California. Alexander’s legal background and personal narrative is important in understanding The New Jim Crow.
The opening pages of The New Jim Crow have a decidedly religious tonality resembling the structure of a conversion experience. Alexander states “I am writing this book for people like me—the person I was ten years ago.”320 The person she was ten years ago understood the dynamics of institutional racism by working on a number of class action employment discrimination cases.321 However, when her focus shifted from employment discrimination to criminal justice reform, she became convinced that the criminal justice system was not merely infected with racial bias. Rather, the system itself was a means of social control.322 Alexander reveals that she previously heard such ideas expressed by
“radical groups” or coworkers who thought the War on Drugs was a conspiracy to put
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320 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 1st ed. (New Press, The, 2010), preface.
321 Ibid.
322 Ibid.
blacks in their place.323 While not convinced at the time, she now sees a new caste system that was previously “impossible to see until its outline is identified.”324 The New Jim Crow is indeed a broad outline that renders visible the way mass incarceration systematically corrals those labeled as criminals into “America’s new undercaste.”325 The New Jim Crow positions the drug war as the primary factor in the
escalation of incarceration. Alexander notes that the drug war has resulted in 31 million arrests and by the end of 2007, seven million Americans were behind bars, on probation or on parole.326 The latter figure is significant as it demonstrates the reach of the criminal justice system as a means of social control. In addition, she details what scholars have called “invisible punishment” and “collateral consequences” associated with felony convictions long after the sentence has been served.327 In particular, Alexander’s focuses on the way in which the label of felon, prevents access to the right to vote, employment, public housing, food stamps and professional opportunities. The legal framing of Alexander’s eschews long-standing debates about the “underclass” in favor of the production of an “undercaste.” She states, “What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so.”328 Thus, the label of felon is the return of legalized discrimination.
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323 Ibid. p. 5.
324 Ibid. 12.
325 Ibid. p. 13.
326 Ibid. p. 59.
327 See Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New Press, 2003), Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Dorothy E Roberts, “Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities, The,” Stanford Law Review 56 (2004 2003): 1271.
328 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, p. 13.
The New Jim Crow grounds this new form of legalized discrimination in a political history that foregrounds the centrality of race for American democracy. Critical to Alexander’s analysis is the perennial forms in which dominant whites achieve “a new racial equilibrium, a racial order that would protect their economic, political, and social interests in a world without slavery.”329 She positions the “birth of mass incarceration” in the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement through and exacerbated by globalization and deindustrialization. Moreover, Alexander chronicles the critical role of the Supreme Court in facilitating the drug war including “eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police.”330 More importantly, she details the way that the criminal justice system has effectively immunized itself from legal challenges. She notes in McClesky v. Kemp the Supreme Court ruled that “racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment in the absence of clear evidence of conscious, discriminatory intent.”331 The effect of this precedent she argues, is that no
“single successful challenge has ever been made to racial bias in sentencing under McClesky v. Kemp anywhere in the United States.”332 That the question of intent was privileged as opposed to harm will prove to be an important point in relating the New Jim Crow to necropolitics.
The New Jim Crow consistently maps the similarities and differences between Jim Crow segregation and mass incarceration as two systems of social control. However, Alexander is explicit in her use of Jim Crow as an analogy. She even argues that those
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329 Ibid. p. 32.
330 Ibid. p. 60.
331 Ibid. p. 106.
332 Ibid. p. 112.
“who claim that mass incarceration is ‘just like’ Jim Crow make a serious mistake.333 The primary mistake being a preoccupation with racial hostility instead of racial indifference defined as a lack of care and compassion about a racial group. The effect Alexander fears is the potential loss of allies if they are made to believe racism manifests itself only in its most, explicit virulent forms. As such, the New Jim Crow focuses a great deal on articulating what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva theorized as “color-blind racism”334as an important component of mass incarceration. The key to Alexander’s use the term is not an historical equivocation with an earlier historical period. Rather it is an image intended to politically mobilize pubic opinion among those who care about social and racial justice in America. The New Jim Crow’s final chapter argues for the necessity of changing public consensus six times culminating with the following claims:
Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial.335 (emphasis added) And,
If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration, and if our advocacy does not upset the prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium.336 (emphasis added)
Thus, I have employed the image of the New Jim Crow here to display the role of necropolitics in maintaining the social agreements or public consensus that occasions mass incarceration.
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333 Ibid. p. 197.
334 See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 2014.
335 Ibid. p. 222.
336 Ibid. p. 224.