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.”
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Senator Cory Booker’s recent 25-hour Senate speech is hailed by some as an act of resistance. Really, it exposes the moral bankruptcy of neoliberal politics, as his performative progressivism clashes…
"One Spring Day …" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Donald Trump’s new “Safe and Beautiful” task force is little more than a thinly veiled assault on Black working-class communities in Southeast D.C., accelerating policing, displacement, and white…
