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.”
Austin Cole is a Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) National Co-Coordinator. BAP and other organizations called on the international community to boycott the 2026 World Cup, which was held in the United…
Black political self-determination is always tenuous, even when Black people hold office. Now that DSA and other leftists are winning elections, the contradictions of Black politics are becoming more…
The National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) reveals dangerous policies that many don't know exist. It is a domestic counterinsurgency mechanism that criminalizes anti-fascist organizing…
“In other words, people revolted against the system. But they did not know that the system was called capitalism.”
The climate crisis is first and foremost a crisis caused by the U.S. denying other nations their sovereignty through imperialist violence, but the U.S. climate movement is more comfortable talking…
