When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society. Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life. What Alexander found shocked her. As I read her book, it shocked me. The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader.
Racialized social control – the systematic dehumanization and social exclusion of non-whites, enforced by pitting low-status whites against non-whites – is a long established American tradition. This system has gone through many phases; as the mechanism of each phase ends, a new mechanism arises to take its place. It began with slavery, segued into segregation (also known as Jim Crow), and now manifests as the War on Drugs and mass incarceration – what Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow.” With each new incarnation, the system is a little less complete, but still operative.
The system began early. For much of the seventeenth century, bondage in America included both whites (indentured servants) and blacks (slaves). It was not unusual for white and black bondsmen and bondswomen to comingle and intermarry – until, late in the century, white bond and black bond laborers united in numerous insurrections against the landed wealthy.
In response, the white planter elite split the races, limited bondage to Africans, and provided a “racial bribe” to poor whites – giving them increased access to Native American land, putting white servants over slaves, and limiting free labor competition with slave labor – enabling the whites to feel “better” than blacks. The racial bribe created the misperception among low-status whites that their welfare and social position depended upon keeping blacks at the bottom. The system was born.
This first phase of the racialized system lasted until the Civil War, emancipation, and reconstruction. With slavery ended, low-status whites and blacks once again united against those who oppressed both. Once again, the elites split the alliance via Jim Crow segregation laws. Once again, white proponents of interracial alliance were bought off and became prominent race baiters.
Jim Crow lasted until the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement broke down yet again the formal mechanisms of racialized control. Racial discrimination was declared illegal, and it became socially unacceptable to admit that one had race-based feelings. The elites’ need to maintain control faced a new challenge: how to put into effect a new version of Jim Crow without appearing to exert race-based control – i.e., how to enforce a color barrier in a colorblind age where no one was allowed to notice color. They found their answer in the War on Drugs and mass incarceration.
The bulk of the book depicts how the ostensibly race-neutral War on Drugs has reestablished racialized social control and created “the new Jim Crow.” The elite cover story – that this is really a “War on Crime” – is necessitated by Americans’ ever-increasing need to delude ourselves that when it comes to race, we are colorblind.
Nonetheless, the label “drug criminal” has always conjured up a specific image. Although rates of drug use and drug dealing among minorities has always been similar to – if not lower than – the rates among whites, “drug criminal” has always been synonymous with “black male.” Given that perception, shared by all strata of society, the war on drugs became a war on black neighborhoods. It was easier to bust street dealers in low-income neighborhoods than to invade suburban homes.
Even better, traffic enforcement provides an optimum environment for selective enforcement against those perceived to be likely “drug criminals.” All of us who drive violate traffic laws all the time. Police overlook most violations – and get to pick and choose whom to stop. Once stopped, police ask for permission to search the car. Most people consent – few know that consent is not mandatory (and police do not have to tell). Although similar percentages of whites and minorities actually have drugs in their cars, stops for “driving while black or brown” creates a vastly disproportionate number of minority “drug criminals.”
The majority of blacks and latinos caught up in the criminal justice system are there for drug offenses. Once caught, they are trapped in the maw of a people-eating machine: get found with drugs; get sentenced to years – sometimes a lifetime – of mandatory incarceration.
The American prison population has exploded to the highest incarceration rate in the world. The numbers are mind-boggling. One half of African American males 18-25 are in jail, prison, or under supervision. More African-American adults are in the American criminal justice system today than were enslaved in 1850.
The justification is that the incarceration rate is caused by the crime rate. Yet the crime rate is the lowest since the early 1970s while the incarceration rate is measured in multiples of that period. Indeed, the War on Drugs causes rather than responds to crime. The mere fact of conviction destroys the economic viability and social cohesion of minority communities. Once convicted of felony drug possession (even for a trace amount), the felon is barred from public housing, is restricted from professional jobs, is often blocked from even low-level employment. Intact families are destroyed; homelessness is created; financial independence, however tenuous, becomes welfare dependency. Stable neighborhoods become desolate, crime-ridden slums.
Which way is out? Alexander cautions against the temptation to think that merely repealing the drug laws and rolling back mandatory sentences will solve the problem. Bringing lawsuits and changing laws without confronting the underlying issue of racialized social control will simply bring back Jim Crow wearing another mask.
Alexander argues that Martin Luther King had moved away from “civil rights” – seen as a struggle for black rights – and toward a fundamental reordering of society across both class and racial lines. To drive a stake through Jim Crow’s heart once and for all, we must end the centuries-old practice of making low-status whites pay the real and perceived price of black progress. So long as “civil rights” means that low-status whites see themselves as bearing the brunt of affirmative action and busing, sharing an ever decreasing number of low wage jobs, and losing their sense of superiority in the process, the elites will have a steady supply of racial shock troops ready to resist social change.
Alexander calls for a mass human rights movement to re-order society. As Alexander points out, it will not be easy. America has been organized from the beginning – as James Madison (quoted by Alexander) put it – “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” If we wish instead to protect the majority against the opulent minority, we must rid ourselves of the essence of Jim Crow, not just its outward form. If we do not, what are we? And if not now, when?
