And then he said something that made me pause: Did you just say you're a drug felon? Basic human rights must be honored. Whether they're labeled 'criminals' because they came into the country without the proper documentation, or whether they were labeled criminals because they were caught with something in their pocket. Your guide to exceptional books. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. " But I think most people imagine if you really apply yourself, you can do it. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow. " So, she uses this passage to set the stage for ending the chapter with a quote from James Baldwin, which suggests that, in some sense, the fate of the country, of the entire American project, lies in the balance and depends entirely on the nation's ability to see all citizens as equally human. Best quotes from the new jim crow. Alexander goes on to show how this system of racial control operates beyond the prison cell as the criminal label follows millions of people of color for the rest of their lives. Formerly incarcerated people are organizing a movement to abolish all the forms of discrimination against them, voting and housing and employment, access to public benefits. What forms of violence have actually been perpetrated by us, the state, the government, us collectively, upon them? … President Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term a "war on drugs, " but it was President Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one. We sent a form for them to fill out.
Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold, " this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. Today, as bad as crime rates are in some parts of the country, crime rates nationally are at historical lows, but incarceration rates have historically soared. In fact, you can be denied access to public housing based only on a [reference], not even convictions. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It affects people emotionally. It is common sense and conventional wisdom that if you arrest one drug dealer, there will be another dealer on the street within hours to replace him.
I had been doing some interviews in the media about my work, and book, and [INAUDIBLE]. Lani Guinier, professor at Harvard Law School and author of Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice. Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial. Times of economic crisis produce not only budgetary concerns, but also rising crime rates and racist scapegoating by politicians, which could easily lead to a reversal in this trend. In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined. Similarly, Brown v. Board did not cause sweeping changes – it was public support 10 years later that caused the real changes in society. Now, if we adopt this attitude, we can't pretend then to really care about creating safe communities. A recent article in the Nation by Sasha Abramsky strikes this tone, pointing to renewed efforts at state and federal levels to rescind some of the worst aspects of racism in the criminal justice system, such as sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine. And when we effectively challenged that core belief, this whole system begins to fall right down the hill. Given the ubiquity of drug crime, police departments make choices about where to focus their efforts. When Alexander follows the money, she learns that there is significant financial gain for law enforcement agencies to maintain the huge scope of the War on Drugs. The new jim crow quotes car. We're going to put you in a cage, lock you in a literal cage, treat you like an animal, and when you're released, we're going to make it almost impossible for you to find work or housing or care for your children. " Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.
A bunch of us clergy have read your book, and organizing, and we're getting that energy, and we're ready to start putting pressure on public leaders. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. The explanation for racial disparities can be summed up in a word: discretion. It's just part of what happens to you when you grow up. The New Jim Crow: Important Quotes Explained. "The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Renews March 20, 2023. But let me tell you what happened. The metaphor of closed doors is apt because while doors may literally be closed in terms of suits not able to proceed, the image of a...
You're likely to attend schools that have zero-tolerance policies, perhaps where police officers patrol the halls rather than security guards, where disputes with teachers are treated as criminal infractions, where a schoolyard fight results in your first arrest rather than a meeting with the principal and your parents. She illustrates how President Reagan uses coded, colorblind language, such as "welfare queen" and "predator, " to use racial hostility to gain political power without making explicitly racist comments. For a very long time, criminologists believed that there was going to be a stable rate of incarceration in the United States. The new jim crow chapter 2 quotes. The war goes on, as you said, but there are efforts underway in various states … to start to change things. Carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race. Your PLUS subscription has expired. 3 million people behind bars, including one in nine young African American men.
The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. A multi-racial, multi-ethnic human rights movement must be [? When I began my work at the ACLU, I assumed that the criminal justice system had problems of racial bias, much in the same way that all major institutions in our society are plagued with problems associated with conscious and unconscious bias. Like many civil rights lawyers, I was inspired to attend law school by the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. We say that when people are released from prison we want them to get back on their feet, contribute to society, to be productive citizens, and yet we lock them out at every turn. People will just think you're crazy. The New Jim Crow Quotes and Analysis | GradeSaver. While it is a strong statement and might seem at first read to be histrionic, all of the data eventually bears the truth of the statement out. The activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of social control. We must deal with it on its own terms. For it has been the refusal and failure to recognize the dignity and humanity of all people that has been the sturdy foundation of every caste system that has ever existed in the United States, or anywhere else in the world. 101, 314 ratings, 4. Your voice doesn't count. The impact that the system of mass incarceration has on entire communities, virtually decimating them, destroying the economic fabric and the social networks that exist there, destroying families so that children grow up not knowing their fathers and visiting their parents or relatives after standing in a long line waiting to get inside the jail or the prison — the psychological impact, the emotional impact, the level of grief and suffering, it's beyond description. A movement to end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison.
He's sharing more details and information.