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.”
This week’s featured author is Psyche A. Williams-Forson. Williams-Forson is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her book is Eating While Black: Food…
The recent Supreme Court decision which banned the use of race as a criterion for college admissions is indeed racist. The decision also obscures the need for Black unity and for a new Black…
The 4th of July celebration is a relic of American exceptionalist ideology. There is very little independence in a capitalist dictatorship.
Days of extreme heat without access to enough water and cooled air become deadlier for an aging prison population.
Protests erupted in France after police killed a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan ancestry. Just as in the U.S. racism in France is the cause of police violence.
