Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Mass Incarceration: The Big Payback, a BAR Interview with Michelle Alexander. Part 1 of 2
15 Jan 2010
🖨️ Print Article

 

“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


More Stories


  • Michael Manley
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    INTERVIEW: Cuba is Fundamental to Us, Michael Manley, 1977
    18 Mar 2026
    “If you can do that to Cuba because somebody doesn't like the Cuban revolution, then how do I know that you don't do that to me tomorrow?” 
  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist , Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    What is the 'Left' in the Era of Global Fascism
    18 Mar 2026
    There is no coherent and sustained leftist movement at the very moment that U.S. led global fascism is accelerating.
  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    The Light of Palestine Will Lead the Way to Global Liberation
    18 Mar 2026
    Black Agenda Report Editor and Columnist, Ajamu Baraka, recently gave a presentation at the 4th International Conference “Palestine: The Nation’s Central Cause.”
  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Weaponizing Oil: Ecocide, Imperialism and the Chemical Warfare Brigades of the U.S. and Israel
    18 Mar 2026
    The US and Israeli war of aggression against Iran continues the ecocide committed against the people of the region.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Play, Black Girl, play! (For the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music’s girls)
    18 Mar 2026
    "Play, Black Girl, play! (For the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music’s girls)" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us