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

Alexander explores the history of “racialized social control” (20) in the United States. During the early colonial period of the 17th century, indentured servitude was the dominant form of labor. White and Black bondsmen occupied a similar socioeconomic rung far below wealthy lords, plantation owners, and other elites who heaped equal scorn on laborers of all races. This system began to unravel in 1675, when Nathaniel Bacon, a white landowner in Jamestown, Virginia, staged a rebellion against the colony’s planter elite that united enslaved people, indentured servants, and poor whites. Although the rebellion ultimately collapsed, it struck fear in the hearts of wealthy planters who endeavored to drive a wedge between poor white and Black laborers to prevent future uprisings. Rather than rely on English-speaking enslaved people from the West Indies, planters began to import people from Africa who were less familiar with European languages and customs, and therefore less likely to commiserate with white laborers. By opening expatriated Indian lands to poor whites and empowering them to form slave patrols and militias, the elite effectively offered poor whites what Alexander refers to as a “racial bribe” (42), the first of many in American history.

Having established race as the dominant social and economic division in colonial America, the country’s founding elite went on to enshrine these divisions in the US Constitution.