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Summary: Introduction

Under slavery and under Jim Crow in the United States, African Americans were either explicitly blocked from voting, or had obstacles placed before them, such as “poll taxes” or “literacy tests.” The “New Jim Crow” does much the same thing by utilizing the criminal justice system. Believing that justice is being served, society ignores this “new Jim Crow.” Police justify the arrests of a large percentage of Black men, who become part of a system of mass incarceration. After their release, access to employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service and voting are limited. This makes their situation no better than that of previous generations under slavery or Jim Crow.

Michelle Alexander admits that she did not believe in the idea of a new caste system. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, she used those newfound rights to attend law school and become a civil rights lawyer, where she worked to maintain gains made by affirmative action and eliminate vestiges of the Jim Crow system. After working with the ACLU for several years and witnessing the effects of the system on the lives of young Black men, she realized that their lives were not simply the result of poverty and limited education. Their lack of opportunities was the direct result of legislation and backed up by court decisions. This legislation was introduced as “The War on Drugs” when it was declared by Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1982. 

Initially, the laws created by the legislation were not all that consequential, as drug use was declining at the time. But by 1985, crack cocaine had spread to poor and predominantly Black neighborhoods. This was in part exacerbated by the Reagan administration’s support of guerilla armies in the Nicaraguan civil war. In 1998, the CIA admitted to encouraging the smuggling of crack cocaine by these guerilla armies into the US, and onto inner-city streets, because it helped to fund the guerilla war in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration, in turn, capitalized on this escalation of crack cocaine use to market the War on Drugs to the public. 

The War on Drugs has led to a direct increase in the incarceration of predominantly Black and brown young men in the United States. In less than 30 years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The US has the highest rate of incarceration, the majority of whom are Black men. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at very similar rates. The difference is that whites are not arrested for these crimes at the same rates. Nor are their lives as severely impacted by a criminal record. 

This reveals the true nature of mass incarceration as a tool of social control (the New Jim Crow) and not a method of punishment. Sociology studies have shown that governments more often use punishment as a tool of social control, not as a response to crime data. Statistics show that other countries with similar crime rates have lower incarceration rates. It can therefore be argued that mass incarceration of Black youth is being used to control this group for their entire lives.

For comparison, in the 1970s, after Jim Crow laws had been abolished, but before mass incarceration, many criminologists thought that prisons would fade away, in part because prison, and the threat of prison, has not been shown to deter crime significantly. Anybody with economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes, regardless of penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future. With such data, the United States should have invested in education, housing, and food security, to ensure equal opportunities for all citizens. Instead, the United States chose mass incarceration, specifically targeted at Black youth. 

Because it has been couched in criminal justice terms, civil rights advocates have largely missed the impact of mass incarceration, instead focusing on much more visible defenses of affirmative action. While worthy, these individual court cases do not help the plight of those affected by the New Jim Crow. One of the few instances, attempting to redress the imbalance of the War on Drugs, was launched in 1999 by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the town of Trulia, Texas.  The NAACP was able to prove that racist profiling and the false, uncorroborated testimony of a single informant, had resulted in the incarceration of almost 15 percent of the Black population in Trulia. But this did little to alleviate the suffering of Black and brown young men incarcerated elsewhere around the United States.

Another distraction from the core problem of mass incarceration is successful people of color. People can point to the success of Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey and claim that the United States has achieved a “color blind” society, where one’s skin color is no longer a barrier to higher social or economic rank. This may be true for an elite, privileged few. But those few distract from the large majority of Black people who are caught in a cycle of poverty from which few escape. The genius of mass incarceration is that it does not overtly arrest people for being a different race. The system simply arrests criminals who turn out to be Black men. They are removed from society at a young age for relatively small offenses, and deprived of the tools they will need to create successful lives on the outside. Once released, they are branded “felons,” and subjected to legal discrimination when looking for jobs and housing. No amount of affirmative action will help them, as they cannot even enter any track where affirmative action would help them.

The stigmatization of being a “felon” also plays a part in marginalizing these Black men. American society, while promoted as a society of equality, is very class conscious. A sacred American myth is that “anybody can raise themselves up” if they work hard enough. But these Black men are stripped, by law, of any means to even try to “move up.” Their lack of success tends to reflect on the minority group as a whole, and contributes to the belief that “Blacks are lazy.” This in turn allows society as a whole to become indifferent to the plight of the Black men who find themselves trapped. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said more than 45 years ago: a racial caste system does not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. It needs only racial indifference.

Partial measures in civil rights policy and litigation cannot alone dismantle this system. It requires a mass cultural awareness and parallel movement, similar to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, that acknowledges this system and the caste it has created, so that it can be wholly dismantled. The goal of The New Jim Crow is to provide the knowledge and data needed to prove that this caste is not just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work, so that it can be identified and removed.

Analysis: Introduction

To illustrate the endurance of American racism, Alexander opens the book with the story of Jarvious Cotton and his family, who have been unable to vote for five generations. Cotton’s family history distills the central thesis of The New Jim Crow in a single anecdote: the criminal justice system is just the new face of a very old system of American racial discrimination. By tracing the roots of the Cotton family’s disenfranchisement, from the horrors of slavery and Klan violence to the more sanitized barriers of poll taxes and imprisonment, Alexander illustrates that racial discrimination has never gone away in America, it has simply taken on different forms. In doing, Alexander introduces the theme of the illusion of racial progress that will be central throughout the book. She notes that, because it’s no longer socially acceptable in the 21st century to explicitly discriminate based on race, more coded systems have arisen, using new language and bureaucratic tools to enforce the same racial disparities.

Taking a closer look at the colorblindness that gives America the illusion of racial progress, Alexander explores the contradictions inherent in her experience on Election Night in 2008. While celebrating the monumental occasion of the election of the first Black man to the American presidency, Alexander was also keenly aware of the limits of this milestone. She uses her experience witnessing a Black man on his knees in a gutter outside of her election night party to underscore that in many ways Obama’s election was a superficial victory. Later in the Introduction, Alexander notes that the New Jim Crow relies on examples of Black exceptionalism, such as Obama and Oprah, to prove that, against all odds, Black triumph is possible in America. However, in many ways, these figureheads are exceptions that prove the rule, inspiring racial apathy and a false sense that everything is okay.

To create a sense of affinity for readers who are new to her ideas, Alexander invites the reader into her own process of understanding the racial roots of mass incarceration. She notes that, despite her lifelong commitment to civil rights, the idea that the Drug War was the New Jim Crow was originally farfetched to her. She shares the research that was most impactful for her own understanding of the new American segregation, introducing readers to the inconsistencies and falsehoods that have riddled the common conversation around the War on Drugs. The project of the book is, in part, to educate readers on a new way to look at mass incarceration, and by tracing her journey towards awareness, she helps ease initial resistance to her new ideas, many of which may fly in the face of mainstream understanding of American history and current racial realities. She also notes that even civil rights groups and other organizations dedicated to racial justice have not been paying attention to the racial underpinnings of the penal system. Alexander uses this lack of awareness to sound an alarm, to create a sense of urgency around a critical issue that has, for too long, been ignored.

Using the metaphor of an optical illusion, Alexander creates a useful framework to understand the insidious nature of racism in America in the age of colorblindness. She invokes how difficult it can be to see an image hidden within another image, emphasizing that one can go their entire lives and fail to see an embedded pattern. Alexander notes that when her own focus shifted, she was unable not to see the systems hidden in plain sight, the rigid caste system that defines the American experience. This metaphor serves two purposes. One, Alexander acknowledges from the outset that there may be pushback to the ideas she puts forth in her book because they may be difficult for many to see, like a hidden optical illusion. Two, the metaphor encourages readers to stick with it, to look a little harder at given institutions, and see if a new pattern, a new image, a new reality might emerge from that inquiry. By outlining the structure of the book in the introduction, Alexander gives readers a birds-eye-view of her entire argument. She, in a sense, attempts to draw the outline of the hidden image within the image, the hidden system within the system.

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