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

“If there is any silver lining to be found in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, it is that millions of people have been inspired to demonstrate solidarity on a large scale across the lines of gender, race, and class in defense of those who have been demonized and targeted for elimination. Trump’s blatant racial demagoguery has awakened many from their colorblind slumber and spurred collective action to oppose the Muslim ban and the border wall, and to create sanctuaries for immigrants in their places of worship and local communities.” 

Given the damage Alexander attributes to the era of colorblindness ushered in after the Civil Rights Movement, she ironically welcomes the fact that Donald Trump’s presidency has made race central to the American conversation once again. While Barack Obama’s election win was a moment of great promise for Black Americans, to Alexander it was also perilous in that it threatened to obscure the fact that race is still a dominant divide across many socioeconomic categories. And while there is little to celebrate about the extent to which the Trump presidency has emboldened white supremacists, according to Alexander, it has made race impossible to ignore as activists fight to reform policing and the criminal justice system.

“Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” 

Alexander starkly encapsulates how mass incarceration most resembles the Jim Crow era. It is difficult to read that list of denied rights and not be reminded of a time when Black Americans were, for all intents and purposes, second-class citizens—a time most believe America abandoned decades ago. This quote also introduces the concept of the racial caste, which she describes as such because it represents a social status that is determined by heredity.