“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
Ajamu Baraka is a Black Agenda Report contributing editor and director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, a project of the Black Alliance for Peace. He recently…
We are joined by Conrad Blackburn, policy counsel and staff attorney in the Criminal Defense Practice of the Bronx Defenders. The Bronx Defenders is a public defender non-profit organization and a…
We’re joined by Anthony Rogers-Wright, a Black Agenda Report contributor and a climate/environmental liberation and racial justice advocate, writer, and policy expert. He is an active member of the…
Trump is not unique in the collective west. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, "democratic" states intensify repression and criminalize dissent.
The appraisal of American universities as liberal institutions remains one of the purest examples of the elasticity of the English language.
