Alexander’s introduction allows ample support of the claim “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” She begins with an example of Jarvious Cotton’s exemption from voting and the fact that his lineage has suffered from the same issue. This immediately gives proof of how the racial caste is still present in modern America as the fundamental right of voting was restricted across multiple generations. Similarly, African Americans have suffered through the generational disadvantage of accumulating wealth. For example, there has been a specific instance in the past where black communities have became extremely successful in gaining economic freedom, but were destroyed by white mobs (Tulsa massacre). How are African Americans expected to succeed at the same rate as their white counterparts when the patriarchal lineage of white people were never restricted from basic materials needed to thrive (accumulating wealth or voting in elections)? Alexander also writes about the uncanny similarity between mass incarceration and Jim Crow segregation. Under Jim Crow laws, African Americans were expected to take a literacy test (practically impossible to pass) in order to vote. Today, after African Americans are released from prisons, “… they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence.” and “they are legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public benefits—much as African Americans were once forced into a segregated, second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era.” This correlates to the literacy test as it places unnecessary barriers that prevent African Americans from integrating into and succeeding in American society.
Category: Blog 10/22
Jim Crow Introduction
America is a nation that is supposedly built on many foundations. One of the biggest foundations of this is the equality of opportunity. The American Dream seems to have evolved into the amazing idea that anyone, from anywhere, can come to America and can accomplish anything. America seems to have built a name of dreams, as people travel from all over the world in order to accomplish their dreams and follow them, or so they have us believe. This may have been the case at one time in the past, but as many people have come to realize, is that America is not as open as presumed. America, although job saturated and capitalist, has some boundaries and exceptions that prohibit this so-called American Dream that is open to everyone. This idea excludes the likes of many minority groups as they are discriminated against and are put at a severe disadvantage. As the fight for slavery ended and people received “equality”, people assumed that life would be as they dreamed. Just because there is equality by law, does not mean there will be equality by society. Racism still occurs as it still occurs today. This is mirrored in the American Dream as black people now are set to believe that they have opportunities, but are merely being played as the facade of economic mobility clouds their minds. They are placed in towns with terrible educational standards and terrible crime. Children that are supposed to be equal, from birth, are taught that they need to work 3 times as hard for the same benefit as a white man. There is no space for economic mobility with the exclusion of education. This is done so the world does not complain about unequal treatment because by law that is what’s going on. “What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plaguety.” The goal of this action is to keep the minority colored community economically dormant, as they live in an America of disbelief and false confidence. They live in an America without the American Dream. The racial caste in America has indeed been redesigned as African Americans are extremely malnourished in countless of areas that are crucial to their success in America.
“The more things change, the more they remain the same”
“we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
What the author, Michelle Alexander, meant by this quote was that we haven’t ended racial discrimination and the prevention of voting for certain groups. We just found a more acceptable way to prevent people voting by labeling them criminals and removing certain rights from them, such as the right to vote. Rather than discrimination against race, we discriminate against criminals, and do what we supposedly ended after racism became socially unacceptable. Alexander backs up this argument by bringing up Jarvious Cotton. She mentions how his ancestors where discriminated against their race and due to this, they weren’t able to vote. However, nothing has changed for him, because like his ancestors, he can’t vote, but not because his race, but because he is, like many other African Americans, a criminal. She also mentions about her experiences working for the ACLU, and how the Drug War is the new Jim Crow. She discovers how the mass incarceration in the United States drew parallels to Jim Crow. African American criminals were legally denied the rights to work, obtain property, etc. just as they were during the Jim Crow era.
A Redesigned Racial Caste in America
“we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it”.
What Alexander means by this is that the way we treat certain minority groups, most notably African Americans, in today’s world is more or less the same way we treated them back then when racism and racist tendencies were rampant and un-regulated.
Alexander backs this argument up by bringing up the story of Jarvious Cotton, who can be representative of countless African Americans living in the US. Cotton’s lineage has been denied the right to vote because of racist obstacles. Whether it be due to slavery or the KKK, they were denied the right to vote. Nothing has changed for Cotton. He too is denied the right to vote because he is labeled as a felon and is on parole. Now one might think, “why is this racist?”. Well, many African Americans are likely to end up in prison at some point in their life and Alexander supports this claim by stating, “The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.6 Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.”. As you can see, African Americans are more likely than any other race group in the US to end up in prison. This is down to many reasons, however Alexander points out that The War On Drugs that was started by then President Ronald Reagan fueled this notion of crack/cocaine impacting and being carried out by inner city African American neighborhoods. Reagan went as far as to “[hire] staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war”. This further established racial stereotypes about African Americans for the public and as a result, “In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase”.
These are all examples of the racial caste system in the US being merely redesigned and still existing because although there aren’t any hate groups running rampant across the US and threatening African American lives, or any extreme cases similar to that matter, American society has been restructured to give most African Americans a disadvantage in life, thus leaving them with the same type of treatment experienced before when racism “was still a problem”.
Racial Instability
“We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Due to advancements in the world, more and more problems about racisms exist. Whether its stereotypical or not it is wrong and there must be change. However it is very difficult because there have only been new problems in this attempt to diminish racism. The article states “The more things change, the more things remain the same”. This shows that even though we try to have change things, we don’t progress in any way and we see that with Racism today. Everyone always talks about how we need change but unfortunately nothing seems to change. This is what the original quote means. We haven’t ended anything we have just changed what the main focus of the issue is about. In my opinion this is the issue, that change isn’t occurring and something must be done.
New Tactics for the Same Goal
Michelle Alexander states, “We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it”. She is trying to bring attention to the fact that racial injustice through the laws still exist, but they keep changing the format of it, but with the same goal in mind: to create a racial hierarchy in the United States, where African-Americans fall victims to racial bias. She is trying to prove the point that the criminal justice is racist by mentioning Jarvious Cotton’s family’s history. She talks about how generations of his family have been denied the right to vote, and each one for a different reason. She states, “In each generation, new tactics have been used to achieve the same goals-goals shared by the Founding Fathers”. This is what she means when she says that the racial caste is just “redesigned”. The criminal justice system will create new methods to put African-Americans in a bad position where there may not be a way to come out. For example, Cotton is seen as a felon who is on parole, hence he is being denied one of the most basic rights: the right to vote. He will now always be seen as an ex felon, and life will be a lot harder for him.
the Racial Caste in America
“we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
By beginning the introduction immediately with the example of Jarvious Cotton and his family history, Michelle Alexander compares the modern criminal justice system and its profound effect on the African-American community to past racial caste systems, including Jim Crow.
Mass incarceration is a detrimental process to social control in America. As Alexander puts it, it is striking “not as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization” (4). She uses this language of the gateway to visualize the “New Jim Crow” as a mechanism that largely minority criminals are sucked into, a track that carries them to a position of immobility and stigmatization. This description provides similarities between this “new caste system” of mass incarceration and suppression, and the 2 major racial castes in the past (slavery and Jim Crow) that “locked [a stigmatized racial group] into an inferior position by law and custom” (4).
Among this caste system imagery is provided research of studies that show how an overwhelming percentage of the prison population are minorities, and that the US imprisons more than any other country in the world, including a larger percentage of African-Americans imprisoned than blacks in South Africa at the height of apartheid.
Additionally, she provides ample examples of how even after release from prison, African-Americans and other felons lose a key sum of legal rights; “they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” (2).
Alexander uses precise diction propped up by multiple research and studies to substantiate a legitimate inquiry for the book’s course to investigate.
Racial instability
“we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
As he had mentioned, “the more things change, the more they remain the same”. Efforts to end racial segregation has only sparked fresh new problems for the people of color. Allowing black individuals to vote, while may seem like a great step forward, only increased tensions between white supremacists and blacks and made things remain the same. In the article, with new addition of drugs like cocaine, crime rates increased among the colored. Although the drugs may be seen like a new addition and improvement, it only moves them backward. With these, it really proves that we haven’t done much to the racial system at all over the years.
Same Story, Different Title
This quote shows just as how Jim Crow has historically denied Black Americans the basic human rights, so do the new laws “redesigned” as apart of our incarceration system. Alexander to support her thesis compares historically oppressive systems to how we imprison Black people today. To this point, there are many similarities seen where the inherent discrimination is shown in the statistics of imprisonment and the consequences after being released. Specifically, even after having done the time ex inmates no longer see the basic rights such as “employment, house, and public benefits”. From this it is insane to expect class elevation and more widely, the American Dream from these impossible circumstances. Therefore, Alexander is portraying how structures as the incarceration system are the methods of creating a caste-like society.
Seen and Not Heard: The Implications of Black Voices in Civic Engagement
I can distinctly remember my first time entering a court house for Jury Duty. It was a cold January morning, and while my only day off from a 6-day work week, I could hardly contain the excitement of participating in civic duty. After a long few hours of standing in lines that stretched outside the courthouse, weaving through a series of metal detectors, and being seated in a ballroom-sized courthouse, the court was finally ready to starting categorizing jury groups. However, before the judge could begin, she asked that all prior felons stand up, and in a single file, walk towards an unidentified room behind the court.
While the court may have perceived this course of action as state-mandated procedure, what I saw was 10 non-white felons lined up in a single-file formation exiting the courtroom into an unknown room beyond. I was immediately flooded with images of National Geographic’s hit series Lockup, a show where Black Criminals are routinely led out of courtrooms in a similar manner, moving towards the genesis of a lengthy stay in prison, that lay beyond the courtroom. On a side note, this show was produced for the sole purpose of catering to “ghetto-gawking” white audiences who desired weekly dosages of “poverty-porn”.
Whatever the implications of this “other room” was, one thing was true, in that each of the 10 felons were A) citizens and B) taxpayers. Expanding on this point, all 10 felons who now had to experience civic engagement in a “separate but equal” room, had all paid for me, a white male, to attend college on the state’s dime, as well as for the many police precincts, state-run prisons, and legislative initiatives that seek to discriminate against minority populations. The resounding truth is that the state promotes unilateral civic engagement on April 15th, but not on the days in which a Black or Brown individual is called upon to interject his/her/their voice into the kind of discourse that shapes the future of our society, and especially not on the first Tuesday of November.
Despite this truth, the greater implications lie within the insecurity of our courts, laws, and social infrastructures as a whole. Insecurity has a long history of facilitating segregation in our post-enslavement society. When slavery was abolished, white elites had a problem on their hands, in how they would be best able to stay in power, while rationalizing marginalized populations, who suddenly had a plethora of rights not recognized beforehand. While black society became increasingly politically collective during the era of reconstruction, and increasingly intellectually collective during periods such as The Harlem Renaissance, white society looked to counteract an emergence of this collective thinking, with cunning techniques to subdue voices of color. Many of these techniques are rebranded as institutionalization tactics, that equate criminality with race, seeking to utilize our prison’s and courtrooms as markers of race, in an age where we are no longer permitted to openly discuss race. As Michelle Alexander States in The New Jim Crow, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” What was once black bodies endlessly toiling on white owned plantations, was reframed as white and black water fountains, and is now reframed as white and black spaces for civic engagement.
Backtracking to the Brooklyn Supreme Court, the same insecurity that white-society once had with the impending emancipation of 1865, and with the civil rights movement to follow only a 100 years later, is the same insecurity that separated and silenced the voices of the 10 felons on that cold January morning only 10 months ago. My last thought is this: Our neoliberal, white-washed society treats Black and Brown citizens in a similar manner to children, where they are to be seen, in our state budgets via tax payments, and in our state-run prisons through aggressive criminalization, but are never to be heard, especially when it comes to census-taking, voting, and serving on jury.