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.”
"Short word problems: do the math" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
On May 30, 2026, a Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Assata Shakur was held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army, wrote these words…
Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister says she backs Trump's conservatism and capitalism, and the criminal case against a hairdresser paralyzed in a police shooting shows exactly what that partnership…
Former Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma spoke with Black Agenda Report correspondent Clau O’Brien Moscoso.
The World Cup is meant to be a celebration of global unity, not a propaganda shield for a superpower waging genocide abroad and running detention gulags on its own soil.
