Michelle Alexander’s new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is exactly what most Americans would expect it be after reading the title or seeing the cover of the book. It’s a well-crafted and articulate piece of extreme race-baiting and grievance-mongering that totally and utterly ignores reality, the antisocial, criminal, and self-destructive behaviors of the “Black Community,” and the negative consequences they suffer as a direct result of those behaviors.
The New Jim Crow is one those uncommon situation where one can judge a book by its cover.
In The New Jim Crow, Alexander systematically argues that America’s judicial system “operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” The War on Drugs, she contends, has created “a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society.” Mass incarceration, and the disabilities that come with the label “felon,” serve, metaphorically, as the new Jim Crow. She further posits that “Race plays a major role-indeed, a defining role – in the current system, but not because of what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility – a feature it actually shares with its predecessors.”
The underlying flaw in her work and her thesis is that Mrs. Alexander willfully ignored the reality that Blacks per capita commit far more crimes than any other cultural group in America. If they being wholesale disenfranchised, and they are, it’s by their own devices and not due to any Jim Crow-esque government conspiracy of control over their population. She, like most race-baiters, Black apologists, and purveyors of “Social Justice,” always seem to see the enactment and enforcement of laws as a “lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups” when Blacks, due to their apparent propensity for criminality, are disproportionately impacted by those laws.
To follow Alexander’s logic to it’s natural conclusion we would have to declare all laws pertaining to violent crime – except, of course, any instance where the crime is White-on-Black – as racist and strike them from the books as Blacks commit approx. 50% of the violent crimes in the US despite being only 13% of the population.
However, I will without reservation concede one critical point to the author. The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine has been proven to serve no purpose and to have been a reactionary measure that needs to properly reach its sunset.
Contrary to what one might expect, I do suggest that Americans read Michell Alexander’s work. The New Jim Crow is very well written and researched. Because it is so and because it shows exactly how professional race-baiters will match facts to their own agendas, biases, and false postulates, its an important work for Americans to read.
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