“Mass incarceration – not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement – is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement,” says Ms. Alexander, a longtime civil rights lawyer. The U.S. national policy of mass incarceration has created an underclass that “is better understood as an undercaste – a lower class of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains a racial hierarchy much like the earlier [Jim Crow and slavery] systems of control.”
Click the player below to hear part one of this Black Agenda Report interview.
Black Mass Incarceration: The Big Payback, a BAR Interview with Michelle Alexander
In this week’s segment we talk about jails and prisons in New York City and State and the end of city control of the infamous Rikers Island jail. But first a Washington DC activist analyzes how the…
Afeni is an activist and lead organizer with Herb and Temple in Washington, DC. She joins us from Oakland to discuss politics in the U.S. and how the people can fight the fascism produced by the…
Our guest is Melanie Dominguez, Organizing Director, New York with the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice. She joins us from New York City to discuss the federal takeover of Rikers Island…
The late Charles Rangel served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus for more than 40 years. But the goals of Black politics and electoral politics are not necessarily the same.
“In theory and in practice, then, Zionism is a degraded repetition of European imperialism.”
