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

In 2020, 10 years after the original publication of The New Jim Crow, Alexander reflects on the dramatic political and cultural changes of the preceding decade. Since then, Americans have mourned the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and countless other people of color, all of whom aside from Martin died either at the hands of the police or, in Bland’s case, while under police supervision. Deaths like these are nothing new. What is new is the fact that they have become staples on the nightly news and on social media. The last 10 years also saw the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and a series of uprisings catalyzed by the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death by police officers. These tragedies set the stage for an end to the era of colorblindness and race-denial, an era Alexander argues was perpetuated by Barack Obama’s election win.

Yet the forces at work to end colorblindness flowed along another vector, one that culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s election win, Alexander writes that we now live in “an era of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political, and economic dominance could be taken for granted” (xi).