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

"Washington. Davis. Wallace. Clement. Obama. Winfrey. Clinton. Trump..... They're all just spokes on a wheel. First, this ones on top, then that ones on top and on and on it spins crushing those on the ground. I'm not going to stop the wheel; I'm going to break it."

The cycle of racial subjugation in the United States follows a pattern: the black poor and white poor find themselves allied against the rich, the white rich attack and control the black poor to bribe the white poor and employ respectability politics to create an internal hierarchy in the population of the oppressed. Eventually, the system of oppression collapses and is replaced by something else. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, and Jim Crow was replaced by mass incarceration. Each system is different and perhaps less awful... but it doesn't take a slave driver to make a slave, just like it doesn't take a racist thought to make one behave racistly.

What Michelle Alexander does in the New Jim Crow is describe this cycle and its current incarnation. She describes the "birdcage" of laws and practices that have been built and explains how they must be the primary target for any social justice movement. This birdcage- really a literal cage- must be destroyed and the desire for aesthetic justice needs to be replaced with a desire for actual human flourishing.

Something that Alexander does that surprised me is attack "cosmetic" justice or "aesthetic" justice warriors. If social justice progress was actually being made, we'd see that in the statistics- a lower racial wage gap, less black Americans in jail, better educations, etc. Instead, what we see are human biases brought to life: we see actors, athletes, and politicians trotted out to fulfill our confirmation and availability biases.

Two concepts are then called into question- Is affirmative action actually good? Is "black excellence" just "black exceptionalism" by another name? They both have roots in conservative, not liberal, ideas. "If we help make a few black students get into good universities, then they will improve the black community" and "There are loads of successful black individuals!"

The phrase Michelle comes back to is "trickle down" to describe these social justice concepts. It is the idea that these concepts are supposed to destroy racial disparities by allowing the wealth and power granted to a few individuals to seep back into the communities. Liberal alarm bells should be ringing: Obviously, if this isn't true for the entire population, it could hardly be true for a subset of the population.

The spokes on the wheel are not just the supremacists, but the collaborators. The entire wheel has to be smashed with an unrelenting focus and love for everybody, not just a few.