The New Jim Crow
by L. Arthalia Cravin
The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
In Washington, D.C., three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.
In some states, African Americans make up to 90 percent of drug prisoners and are up to 57 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes than whites.
“Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.”—FROM THE NEW JIM CROW
“As the United States celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status—much like their grandparents before them.
In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.”
Chapter one of Ms. Alexander’s new book is entitled, “The Rebirth of Caste.” The chapter heading reads thus: “[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” — W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America She then recites this statistic: “One fourth of young African American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system. For more than two hundred years, scholars have written about the illusory nature of the Emancipation Proclamation. President Abraham Lincoln issued a declaration purporting to free slaves held in Southern Confederate states, but not a single black slave was actually free to walk away from a master in those states as a result. A civil war had to be won first, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and then—only then—were slaves across the South set free. Even that freedom proved illusory, though. As W.E.B. Du Bois eloquently reminds us, former slaves had “a brief moment in the sun” before they were returned to a status akin to slavery. Constitutional amendments guaranteeing African Americans “equal protection of the laws” and the right to vote proved as impotent as the Emancipation Proclamation once a white backlash against Reconstruction gained steam. Black people found themselves yet again powerless and relegated to convict leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery. Sunshine gave way to darkness, and the Jim Crow system of segregation emerged—a system that put black people nearly back where they began, in a subordinate racial caste.”
Ms. Alexander then traces American indentured servitude, “the birth of slavery,” commencing with the early colonists who laid the foundation for America’s permanent and pernicious type of bondage based on skin color, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Ms. Alexander’s scholarly work reminds us that, by the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The need for race-base bond labor transcended the eventual freeing of slaves, and when mixed with an angrier and more violent white resistant to black equality, attached itself to every conceivable aspect of black life, first through the machinations of Jim Crow’s “Black Codes,” then as permanent systemic race discrimination that continues to this day. Black men became both the primary targets and victims of this race-based bond labor system. Ms. Alexander relies on research from Douglas Blackmon’s award-winning book entitled, “Slavery by Another Name.” Mr. Blackmon’s book described how vagrancy laws, and other laws defining a wide range of activities such as “mischief,” and “insulting gestures,” were vigorously enforced against black men. This aggressive enforcement resulted in thousands of black men being arrested, hit with court fines and other costs which they could not pay, which exposed them to latter-day slave labor through convict leasing arrangement. As late as the 1950s thousands of black men were, in effect, sold off to the highest private contractor bidder and forced to worked in lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and in dozens of other corporations across the South. These men were treated cruelly, often whipped by white overseers on horses, left to die of their injuries, or literally worked to death.
Ms. Alexander’s book then makes a telling link between slavery, convict labor, and today’s oppressive drug laws. These laws have found support in politicians of every stripe including George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and II, and Bill Clinton, who, according to Ms. Alexander, orchestrated the largest increase in black male imprisonment in American history. Even during the Civil Rights protest years, southern politicians equated non-violent civil unrest as “crimes” requiring “law and order” force. The result is what we have to day—a prison system bursting at the seams with almost a million young black men. According to Ms. Alexander, if the statistics for black male incarceration were applied to white men the nation would be up in arms over their plight. But, no politician, not even Obama, would dare to invite their own political suicide by addressing what is happening to black men every day.
Ms. Alexander’s excellent book will find its way onto a few library shelves, but unfortunately it will not find its way into a serious public discussion about the enormous waste of talent and lives of so many young black men who are living out their most product years in situations not too far removed from slavery—except it is now “idle slavery.” Ms. Alexander’s findings should be on the tongues of every politician and political pundit with access to the air waves. Every black household should be reading her book and gathering in community small groups to come up with solutions to this mass incarceration problem. But no one is talking about the magnitude of the problem of race-based mass incarceration. No one is talking about how politicians have played the “we must have law and order” game to their own advantage to increase the mass incarceration of black men. Still America proclaims itself to be the “land of the free.” Worst yet, everyday across this country millions of black children stand at attention while reciting the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, “One Nation under God, with liberty and justice for all,” while a racist, corrupt, criminal justice system hauls off their fathers to be locked up like dogs in a kennel.
<p align=”left”><span style=”font-size: x-small;”>Copyright 2010 - L. Arthalia Cravin. All rights Reserved. No part of this commentary may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.</span></p>
