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

And second thing is I had the really wonderful experience about a week ago of reconnecting with one of my Stanford Law School classmates Michelle Alexander.

Michelle is the author of a book called The New Jim Crow.

My law school class was extraordinary.

And Michelle was at the top of the list of extraordinary people.

But I think what changed is.

You know, the end of Jim Crow, the end of a certain kind of oppression, the beginning of this mass incarceration moment that we have now, like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow talks about and and so many others.

And yeah, so I don't know if it's.

I mean, I don't and I still I don't hear it as being necessarily anesthetized.

penal prison labor yeah i mean basically i

wanted to there's this book that i really wanted to read i mean there were two books i wanted to read for this but i could just recommend them it was our prisons obsolete by angela davis and then there was this other book called the new jim crow which came out in 2010 by Michelle Alexander and I really want to read it it sounds really interesting and it's basically how just like war on drugs mass incarceration basically replaced the Jim Crow era where it's like you don't have segregation anymore technically but instead you're just um having a disproportionate yeah disproportionately arresting black men and incarcerating them on minor drug charges

I watched like a, I think I watched like a documentary on it.

It was on, I think Netflix ages ago, but it was specifically about like, yeah, how they sort of segregate black and white neighborhoods in America through like the way they charge for like cocaine or like crack cocaine, even though it's the exact same thing, but one of them is like more prevalent in black communities.

She is an Associate Professor of History and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her previous book, Chained in Silence, received multiple awards, and she is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Miss Magazine, The Root, and Vox.

Joining her tonight is Marcus Board Jr., an associate professor of political science at Howard University and the author of Invisible Weapons.

So I guess we'll just get into it.

So this was an amazing read.

I'm really grateful to be here with you all to talk about this book, Searching for Jane Crow.

Talitha and I have not met before this, but we're clearly going to be lifelong friends.

We talked about that this year earlier.

But at any rate, and even again, patting myself on the back because a big part of my grousing about the second worst book we've ever read, I've ever read, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, that she totally omits the impact of Vietnam in the incarceration and in the drug war.

She totally omits that from all of it.

Even John Burge, Mark Furman, both Vietnam veterans.

I generally play the slow hymnal religion of white supremacy version, but it's the same song.

I did not think.

Well, one, I did think, hey, on the sly, we are reading a book about black people, males and females who made a radio program to talk about racism.

Hey, hey, hey.

Y- you know, there's a book by Michelle Alexander.

It's called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Sh- masses, hundreds of hu- of Black people get arrested every day and thrown in jail and they rot there in America.

And, uh, she argues that if the institutions, the criminal justice system of America arrested white people, there would be a political backlash.

And I really hope that this book does for family revival.

What, for instance, Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, did for changing the conversation around criminal justice reform.

And even if we don't agree with all her conclusions, her book was consequential to that debate.

Absolutely.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this reading.

This was a palate cleanse from New Jim Crow.

Second worst ever.

But where he says, Robert F., the Freedom Riders returned to the courthouse to picket despite the fact that I expressed disapproval We had learned from earlier demonstrations that the weekend was a bad time to picket.

Walton fixed herself a glass of lemonade and expounded on her abiding interest in Brazilian folk art.

Busts and figurines topped a bookcase packed with titles like Sunset Western Garden Book, The New Jim Crow, and Maya Textiles of Guatemala.

In twenty nineteen, after her husband died, Walton downsized from her home in Berkeley, building an ADU next to her son's house.

Soon after, she learned about the nineteen-story proposal.