Part One of this interview appeared here, in the January 6 issue of BAR. On January 20, BAR will begin publishing excerpts from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [The New Press].
“Mass incarceration has turned the Black community against itself,” says Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Black Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Mainstream organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights put out laundry lists of proposed reforms, while failing to make America’s Black Gulag a priority. “If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration,” says the veteran civil rights lawyer, “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.”
Farmaajo, a hugely popular Somali politician who has never been favored by the US, is widely expected to seek the presidency in Somalia’s 2026 election.
"Day 40-something pedophile-protecting government shutdown" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Despite being held in Brazil, a nation with the largest Black population outside of the African continent, COP30 has continued a thirty-year pattern of sidelining the specific climate threats to Afro…
Decades of unmet promises and endemic corruption have eroded the ANC's legitimacy, creating a surge of support for a party led by South Africa's white minority.
As U.S. militarism intensifies across Latin America and the Caribbean, regional social movements are making the firm declaration that only a unified, mass-driven front can build a true "Zone of Peace…
