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

Born in Chicago in 1967, Michelle Alexander is a civil rights advocate, professor, and columnist for The New York Times. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she earned her law degree from Stanford Law School. From 1998 until 2005, Alexander served as the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program in Northern California. Near the start of her tenure there, Alexander came across a flyer proclaiming, “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW” (4). At the time, she considered the slogan hyperbolic at best and harmful to efforts to combat racial bias in the criminal justice system at worst. While Alexander acknowledged the extreme biases evident in the criminal justice system, she attributed this to broader trends of systemic racism observable across American institutions, not to a concerted effort of social control.

Over time, however, Alexander began to view the War on Drugs and mass incarceration as agents driving a new racial undercaste in America, an experience she recounts in an interview in The New Yorker. A major turning point came when interviewing potential plaintiffs for a class-action suit against the Oakland Police Department. A 19-year-old African American man came into her office with a stack of papers detailing every interaction he had with police officers over a nine-month period, including officers’ names, badge numbers, and witnesses. He would have been a dream plaintiff if not for the drug felony on his record. Although Alexander wanted to help him, she knew that any class-action suit centered on an individual with a drug felony was destined to fail. The young man launched into a story about how the police planted drugs on him and beat up him and his friend. He accepted a plea deal to avoid jail time, not knowing it would all but eliminate his chances to obtain employment and public housing. Eventually, the man broke down, repeating, “What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?” Of the young man, Alexander said he “forever changed the way I viewed myself as a civil-rights lawyer.” (Remnick, David. “Ten Years After ‘The New Jim Crow.’” The New Yorker. 17 Jan. 2020.)

The young man’s story is an all-too-common one found in The New Jim Crow, which Alexander published in 2010. Although the book was not an immediate financial success, its 2012 paperback edition landed on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and reached the top of the Washington Post best-seller list later that year. Since then, Alexander has been invited to speak on college campuses and in other forums across the country. In 2015 The New Jim Crow was named required reading for every incoming freshman at Brown University.

As of 2020, Alexander was a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York and an opinion columnist for The New York Times.