The New Jim Crow: Is Colorblindness This Generation

The stability of racism in the United States has changed over centuries of its existence. Instead, racism shifts and molds into often unrecognizable ways that fit seamlessly into the fabric of the American consciousness to make it utterly invisible to the majority of white Americans. In the current era of political thinking, colorblindness, or society’s unwillingness to discuss or even recognize race in any way, seems to be the dominant perspective. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shatters this dominantly held ideology.
Alexander, who for many years worked as a civil rights lawyer, uses her vast experience and knowledge concerning the criminal justice system to craft a meticulously researched argument that “colorblindness” is this generation’s most important civil rights issue. As the title indicates, she makes the bold claim that mass incarceration is the 21st century version of Jim Crow. This era in our racial history was one in which brutally devastating laws discriminated and segregated black populations. During Jim Crow, the idea of justice did not exist for black people within law enforcement or court systems. Though her argument is daring, Alexander successfully proves it by analyzing the criminal justice system. She discusses multiple ideas to formulate a case for individuals who are interested in social justice that refocus efforts to tackle the issue of over-populated prisons. In the books introduction, Alexander asserts that she is writing for an audience that cares deeply about racial justice, but also, she wants to empower individuals who have a impression that our nation’s criminal justice system is flawed, but do not have the data or evidence to back up their assumptions.
It is important to note that The New Jim Crow does not seek to be a full analysis of the ways in which the criminal justice system affects people of color who are not black or how the system affects women of