“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
Dr. Gerald Horne is an author and historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
Hassan El-Tayyab is the Legislative Director for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. He joins us to discuss opportunities for passing congressional legislation on…
Kameron Hurt is an organizer with the Coalition to Free Ruchell Magee. He joins us from New York to discuss the efforts to free this political prisoner held for many decades.
The U.S. can shoot down balloons, call names, and claim that China has "police stations" in New York City. It cannot stop the decline of its own making as it engages in war propaganda theater.
Reparations for slavery? What about imperialism? A 1932 statement on Dutch imperialism as the exploiter of the masses of Curaçao suggests why.
