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 Tanya Katerí Hernández. Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Her book is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-…
The traumatizing clearing of the University City Townhome encampment in West Philadelphia symbolizes the ongoing racial injustice of gentrification. One solution: The city should buy the…
The U.S. and its European allies often determine who will govern African nations. Attendees at a recent conference discussed how to end this dynamic and create true sovereignty on the African…
The CIA's Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists to the U.S. and MKULTRA mind control experimentation was one of its projects. Black prison inmates were targeted for these unethical procedures.
