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.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Tracie Canada. Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of…
The SanctionsKill campaign exposes how US economic warfare kills civilians across the Global South. Meanwhile, the Palestinian-led BDS movement represents a legitimate tool of grassroots resistance…
The US government left Black residents to die after Hurricane Katrina, refusing Cuba's offer of emergency doctors. This racist neglect exposed a truth that the US state would rather sacrifice its own…
The current military occupation of DC is not an anomaly but an escalation of a long war on Black communities, a more visible form of ongoing political subjugation.
From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, an axis of ethno-supremacy is rising, fueled by U.S. backing. Same guns. Same flags. Same ideology. Gaza and Donbass are not separate wars. They are one machine.
