Study Questions For The New Jim Crow (145 Points)

Study Questions for The New Jim Crow (145 Points)
1) What did you know about this issue before beginning the book? What did you learn from the Acknowledgements and from the Preface?
Through the news I understood that our current prison system locks a majority of nonviolent drug criminals. This has come to my attention due to the fact that most of my high school friends had at least one relative in prison because of drug offenses – at the time, I lived in a mostly blue-collar oriented small city, and the majority of students were of Mexican race. Nevertheless, I was not aware of the consequences people have to endure once they leave prison. From the acknowledgments one can appreciate that this book required lengthy effort to produce, but it
What important events did she choose to make her historical points, and why? What role did the idea of race play in these periods?
Alexander describes the birth of slavery as means to cope with the ever increasing demand for labor on tobacco and cotton fields. Africans, who were powerless at the time, were ideal to fill these positions. According to Alexander, Bacon’s Rebellion was one of the main reasons for the importation of African slaves. She describes that Nathaniel Bacon, a white property owner, launched an attack on the planter elite when they refused to help him seize more land. Bacon created an alliance between white and black bond laborers, and slaves; nevertheless, planters deemed too risky to rely on white servants and black slaves, instead they opted for imported slaves from Africa – since they would be far less likely to revolt. Eventually, Alexander describes how the Constitution supported the interests of slaveholders, and grew to conserve a racial caste system. To mark the end of slavery, Alexander summarizes the death of slavery following the Civil War events and the Reconstruction Era. Nonetheless, the ideas that Africans were not good enough to be called citizens, and that whites were superior still troubled the
The so called Ku Klux Klan emerged on the south, bringing acts of terrorism against local leaders and Reconstruction governments. Eventually, the federal government was forced to withdraw its troops from the south, and coupled with cuts in the Freedmen’s Bureau budget, states were given the green light to stablish again their own laws against black men. Alexander states that vagrancy laws were enacted in order to mass incarcerate blacks so that they will repay their apparent “debts” with forced labor. Being a convict basically meant that one would completely lose all of his/her rights, in Alexander’s words, “convicts were understood to be slaves of the state.” Eventually segregation laws would be imposed in an effort to avoid a possible alliance between poor whites and African Americans against the