The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

In June of 2020, when the media is convinced the world is turning upside down, I’m reminded of a Murakami quote: “the world isn’t that easily turned upside down, people are”. Yet, while people are turned upside down during this time, the crowd’s emotion channeled itself to spark the human rights movement for the new decade, this time against the police. I picked up this book to learn more about what happened between the last civil rights movement and this one. Alexander describes the history and the origins of the mass incarceration of black and brown men, and it tells not of just the history of mass incarceration, but of the broader picture that encompasses police brutality, of how the defenders-of-justice-police became the militants that came to inspire terror in minority ghettos. The book examines in detail the War on Drugs that started in the 1980s and how it incentivized the police to sweep through ghettos and arrest black and brown males en masse for minor drug crimes. Alexander is an absolutely phenomenal and deeply analytic writer, her points concise and clear and backed by so many specific cases and research.

When Nixon’s advisor in his 1968 campaign suggested, “we’ll go after [the vote of] the racists”, it was a sign of things to come. Later, the 1980s brought the Reagan administration, and with it the War on Drugs and a platform to crack down on law and order. Law and order had done so well and it’s virtually impossible to disagree with, and so conservatives leaned on it heavily, letting police crackdown in ghettos and arresting young men for the smallest of crimes, accompanied with the most extreme of sentences. In doing so, they reinforced the stereotype of the black criminal, and a government that was tough on crime was something most people could get behind: moderates thought society was safer with these criminals locked up, and bigots likely cheered silently when blacks were thrown in jail, reaffirming their prejudices. Bush Sr. took the baton and ran further, giving history the Willie Horton ad that lives on in its notoriety. Clinton saw how easy the platform was to advocate and how great the rewards were, and outdid even the Republicans on how “tough” he was on crime, and later, even the Obama administration instituted harsher policies on crime. Of course, I’m omitting some details – the role of crack cocaine was a huge windfall for the conservatives to advance their agenda in 1985, something Alexander elaborates into great detail – but the point that stuck with me was how it didn’t require blatantly evil racists to institute and maintain such a system of racial control, but rather just opportunistic people who saw the misery of black and browns as collateral in their conquest to earn support of a majority-white voter base. Not open or outright hate, but rather political opportunism and detachment to others’ pain ruined millions of lives; this should be haunting to anyone.