I finished reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and over the next several days I plan to summarize some of her key findings and aspects that resonated with me.

Alexander’s intention is to stimulate much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States.

I also found the Teaching ‘The New Jim Crow’ from the Teaching Tolerance web-site to be an incredibly useful reflection tool: https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/publications/teaching-the-new-jim-crow.

This site includes resources for teachers to facilitate discussions in their classrooms and also includes excerpts from the book itself.

They ask students to engage with three essential questions:

How does the U.S. criminal justice system create and maintain racial hierarchy through mass incarceration?

How does the current system of mass incarceration in the United States mirror earlier systems of racialized social control?

What is needed to end mass incarceration and permanently eliminate racial caste in the United States?

As a quick background, Jim Crow laws were established in 1896, where the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Despite this legal principle, facilities for African Americans were far from equal as their facilities were inferior to their white counterparts, which contributed to economic, educational, and social disadvantages for the African American Community.

The Brown vs. Board of Education case declared segregation of public schools unconstitutional, but it took many years for some states to follow through with the Supreme Court ruling.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights act (1964-1965) technically ended any remaining Jim Crow laws, but Alexander argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the new Jim Crow.

more tomorrow...