Review: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, rev. ed. (2012)

[truepenny]

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So this is a book about what the War on Drugs accomplished, which is not any significant decrease in drug use but instead an almost unfathomably massive explosion in the prison population and the trapping of millions of people in what Alexander calls an "undercaste" (even once you get out of prison, if you're branded a felon, mainstream society and the mainstream economy are effectively closed to you, and you are caught in a vicious circle that puts you right back in prison). Also the militarization and corruption of the police. I didn't realize I needed another reason to hate Ronald Reagan, whose administration created the billions of dollars juggernaut War on Drugs out of essentially nothing, but hey, have one anyway. Although the War on Drugs is nominally "colorblind" (itself an exceedingly problematic idea), in practice, the police target people of color (in particular young Black men) and leave young white (middle-class, college-attending) drug dealers alone. This is a perfect example of Ibram X. Kendi's argument that policy leads public opinion. The Reagan administration said, "Look! Black drug dealers everywhere!" and everybody looked and saw Black drug dealers. Clinton also comes out looking very bad through this lens, and Obama doesn't look so hot, either. (And of course she was writing in the era before Trump and 2020 and George Floyd---although not, let's note, before Black men started dying in police choke-holds---so everything looks a little odd.)

This is a horrifying book and rightly so. The most horrifying part is perhaps the section where she talks about what it's going to take to UNDO the War on Drugs, which has wound itself through the justice and penal system in ways that are both jaw-droppingly blatant and terrifyingly subtle. And of course the work that will have to be done to ensure that ANOTHER racial caste-making system doesn't replace the War on Drugs the way the War on Drugs replaced Jim Crow and Jim Crow replaced slavery.



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