Review: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

I’ve been putting off reading this book for about a year and I can now see why. This book was every bit of amazing, but a tough pill to swallow. As a kid that grew up in the suburbs and played a majority white sport growing up, there is still so much I have yet to learn.

I was amazed at how unfair the criminal justice system is and how it sets up black people specifically for failure. After the end of the civil war, we became free from slavery, but we were then left without homes and ways to fend for ourselves on the day to day. Slave owners found a new system of control that was designed to “exploit and control black labor” often times using the incarcerated to their benefit. After that, the Jim Crow Laws were invented to severely “stigmatize and segregate blacks on the basis of race”. Mass incarceration “perpetuates and deepens pre-existing patterns every so segregation and isolation, not just by removing people of color from society and putting them in presence, but by dumping them back into ghettos upon their release.” It seems there’s just no escaping the white man and his need to be in power.

This book shows us how racial caste systems (slavery and The Jim Crow Laws for example) seem to die when in fact, they are just reborn and labeled something else. Similar with mass incarceration and The War On Drugs. All systems set up to control black people and keep us in our place in society. For example, with the War On Drugs in place, there are harsher drug sentencing on crack vs that of cocaine simply because black people are more likely to be found using crack and more white people use cocaine. Same drug, different forms, yet one takes on a far more intense punishment that’s extremely hard to bounce back from.

I also couldn’t understand why growing up, I watched so many black people praise Bill Clinton as a president when he adopted many of the policies that Ronald Reagan put in place to harm black people. He attended the execution of a mentally ill black man, Ricky Ray Rector to prove just how tough he was on criminals. I’m surely seeing the Clinton’s in a different light and if I new back in 2015 what I know of them now, Bernie Sanders would have had my vote instead.

While learning about how blacks are targeted to get into the system, I also learned a lot about how much it effects our people after they get out of the system. With a federal charge on their name now, it’s extremely hard for lower class blacks to bounce back. Often times having no place to live afterwards, they are almost forced back into a life of crime just to survive. Getting a job is no easy task with having to check of the box “criminal” on each job application. Aside from that, benefits such as Section 8 house and food stamps are no longer available to them because of being stamped a criminal for the remainder of their lives. And the sad thing, some of these people are completely innocent of these crimes or had small amounts of marijuana on them, a drug that is now found legal in some states. It’s heartbreaking and doesn’t sit well with me at all. And finding change, will be no easy task whatsoever.

This book was an excellent read and one I will definitely pass down to my loved ones. It left me with so many questions and not enough answers. My first read of 2019!

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