New Jim Crow Discrimination

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Originally published in 2010 "The New Jim Crow" is a highly popular book by Michelle Alexander. Michelle Alexander is a highly successful civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. In this book she focuses in on the legal systems that seem to be doing their jobs perfectly well but in fact just replaced one racial caste system with a new one. If you are not familiar The Jim Crow is a system that put black people nearly back where they began in a subordinate racial cast. This is a system that is still going on in society today, just because there are successful blacks like Barack Obama does not eliminate this system. The fact that blacks have reached a high amount of success does not mean that the segregation class between blacks and other …show more content…
Even dating back then America saw disenfranchising black men as essential to the original union. Even today many are still not able to vote due to their status as a felon. Due to this label they are at a higher risk for discrimination in many ways such as housing, employment, voting, food stamps, and much more. Which brings us to a situation much like the Jim Crow. An example of discrimination in todays' society would be someone who committed a crime who is labeled as a felon. This individual after serving their time then gets out of prison and tries to turn their life around by trying to pursue a job is cut short because on the application it ask are you a convicted felon. In this scenario an employer would not hire someone who has a felony to their establishment because it is not a good look. Alexander soon starts a job at ALCU once in she immediately seen that there was racial bias in the criminal justice system. Focusing in on the correctional systems and statistics in 1972 less than 300,000 were held in prisons and jails; Today it is 2 million. Acknowledging what is going in todays' …show more content…
Over the years big organizations such as NAACP has made some type of progress and in that result racial profiling has seemed to go under the radar and gone under attack in recent years. What Alexander is trying to get across is that The New Jim Crow and that our view point of colorblindness hides the reality of a new racial caste system. The Criminal Justice system is used for a gateway into a larger system of stigmatization. Nowadays, to stigmatize is to shame or brand a person in a more symbolic way. Even in todays' correctional system the basic layout of The New Jim Crow is actually still in place because those who are arrested and labeled criminals are still acknowledged by a second class. It is highly important to know the differences between mass incarceration, slavery, and The New Jim Crow. Throughout history there has always been a collapse of each one of these systems of social control but soon after there has always been a development of a new social control. Even dating back through time Alexander takes us through the history of race and racism in America. Race was something used by whites to make themselves superior to Native
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