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.