Table of Diversity Weekly Preview: One of Our Favorite Books!

In 2020, I was pregnant with my first kid and the world was shut down because of the pandemic. I decided to read a couple books before baby arrived and because of the focus on racial injustice that happened in my backyard with Breonna Taylor and around the country with George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery, I read social justice books. The first book I read was The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I'd had this book on the shelf for a while and thought that early-2020 was a good time to pick it up.

I'm not sure if it was the pregnancy hormones or the state of the world, but I found the book to be extremely heavy. I needed to talk it through with someone where I could be vulnerable, we could dissect the book, and maybe even ask some experts to join to tell us how we could facilitate change in our own corner of the world. So, I started a book club! I found other leaders who had read the book or wanted to read the book and we met (virtually) for a discussion. It led to almost 3 years of book discussions and trainings that have cascaded through many organizations.

As a result, I've read so many great books that I'll include in various editions of the Table of Diversity Weekly. For this preview, let's discuss The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

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

"The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

As the United States celebrates its “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights—including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America."

About the Author- Michelle Alexander

"Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — the bestselling book that helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice in the United States. Since The New Jim Crowwas first published in 2010, it has spent nearly 250 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists motivated by Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”  The book has won numerous awards, including the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.  Alexander has been featured in national radio and television media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, CNN, Bill Moyers Journal, The Colbert Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, Tavis Smiley, Democracy Now!, and C-SPAN.

Over the years, Alexander has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinic.  In 2005, Alexander won a Soros Justice Fellowship that supported the writing of The New Jim Crow and accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.   Currently she is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Prior to joining academia, Alexander engaged in civil rights litigation in both the private and nonprofit sector, ultimately serving as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the Project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, and coalition building and launched a major campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement known as the “DWB Campaign” or “Driving While Black or Brown Campaign.”

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. She has clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals."

Demetria's Reflections

I remember preparing for the book discussion. We have a couple dozen people registered to attend. I have way too many questions prepared and every page of my copy of the book was highlighted and flagged so I could come back to it. There was (and still is!) so much to discuss about this book.

Alexander did a wonderful job of walking the reader through the history of incarceration, starting with slavery through modern times. Because Alexander's background is in law, the book is filled with laws, rules, norms, and customs- both explicit and implicit. She explains the intended and unintended consequences of each of the shifts that occurred over time.

You may be wondering, 'how can I, a regular person, benefit from reading this book?'

Well, dear friend, I can think of a couple ways!

1. Having an understanding of the realities and perspective of history from different points of view is vital. While we may be in the same ocean, we aren't in the same boat! There's so much to learn about different historical events outside of what we learned in grade school. Some of the events in the book will sound familiar, but you'll gain a new understanding of the full context of the event, including who was helped and who was hurt.

2. You see the ripple effect of various laws and norms to this day. Check out this excerpt from the book:

"Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded a felon...It is a badge of inferiority- the felony record- that relegates people for their entire lives, to second class status. As described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to 'check the box' indicating a felony condition on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy- permanently."

3. You can learn more about systems- how they are created, maintained, and developed over time. Prior to this book, I naively believed that many systems were the product of unintended consequences created by people who weren't very bright. Now, I think differently, somewhat. I still believe that most people who have created these horrible systems are not quite bright, however, the systems were created to do exactly what they are doing. Alexander points out many of the very intentional decisions that were made along the way that put certain groups of people at a disadvantage.

Could you be creating systems within your organization that are putting people at a disadvantage?

Are you ready to read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander? Check out the full edition of the Table of Diversity Weekly to get access to podcasts, videos, movie recommendations, book guides, and more to deeper your learning as you read the book!

I'll end by sharing one more quote from the Introduction of the book:

"Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. 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...We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."