Throwing Away The Key

[groovedaddy]

In 1998 Michelle Alexander had just been hired by the northern-California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) to head its Racial Justice Project. She was running to catch the bus to her new office when she glimpsed a bright orange poster proclaiming, “The Drug War Is The New Jim Crow.”

“Jim Crow” refers to local and state laws enacted between 1876 and 1965, mainly in the South, that mandated racial discrimination and segregation. At the time she saw the poster, Alexander considered it absurd. “I clung to the notion that the evils of Jim Crow are behind us,” she writes. But after a few years of working for the aclu on issues of racial profiling and drug enforcement, she was forced to reevaluate: “I began awakening to the reality that this criminal-justice system is not just another institution infected with racial bias, but the primary engine of racial inequality and stratification in the U.S. today.”

Alexander now believes that the “War on Drugs” was the creation of conservative political strategists who wanted to appeal to poor and working-class whites resentful of the gains African Americans made during the civil-rights era. That it resulted in disproportionate drug-arrest rates in poor communities of color may even have been part of the plan, she says. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press), Alexander cites some alarming statistics: for example, in 2004, 75 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses were black or Latino, despite the fact that the majority of the country’s illegal-drug users and dealers are white.

The child of an interracial couple (her mother is white; her father, now deceased, was African American), Alexander witnessed directly the challenges of racial integration. After her parents had married in Chicago in 1965, Alexander’s mother was promptly disowned by her family and excommunicated from her church. The newlyweds ended up moving to Stelle, Illinois, a three-hundred-person progressive intentional community, where Alexander was born in 1967. When she was eight, her father, who worked for ibm, was transferred to San Francisco, and the family moved to the Bay Area. Although he was one of the office’s top salespeople, he was unable to climb the corporate ladder and ended up leaving his job. Alexander attended many schools, both public and private, which exposed her to people from diverse backgrounds. Later, when she saw how severely black youths are treated by the criminal-justice system, she recalled how often she’d seen white teens participate in the same criminal activities.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing_away_the_key