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.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro negotiated with President Trump to avoid armed conflict.
"A whistle and honk for our cities under siege" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
The political theater of condemning Trump's racism serves the function of diverting attention from the more dangerous, policy-based racism that operates with bipartisan support.
To dismantle ICE, we must first understand its purpose in a global system. The struggle against this agency is a struggle against the machinery of imperialism itself.
True solidarity means recognizing an attack on Cuba as an attack on all who resist empire.
