Reddit reviews The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
We found 36 Reddit comments about The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
New Press
Don't even try to play this "I'm not sure, I need evidence" bullshit. This is the definition of being naive. You must actually not be a human with any grasp of the society you live in to even think someone needs to present evidence to you of institutionalized racism. There's literally no way you're old enough to type on a computer to not have been presented countless times of institutionalized racism throughout your life.
Alive and well in our justice system.
Alive and well in our schools.
Alive and well in our food supply.
Billions of other examples for your naive mind.
You should check out this book if you actually are as naive as you claim to be.
"[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."
_____
This is a long read, but it's well worth it if you have the time. The first section is mostly background information that is not essential to the War on Drugs sub-context, if you want to gloss over that part. About halfway through is where you get to the relevant discussion:
>A smooth-faced, heavyset politics junkie of twenty-four, Brownell had a dream job: administrative assistant to Nixon's political manager, Harry S. Dent. Dent had masterminded the so-called "southern strategy" that pried white southerners away from the Democratic Party during the last election by playing to their fear of black power and their anger at the civil rights movement. It had transformed the GOP's image from country-club golfer to defender of working whites fed up with expensive hand-wringing over Negroes and the cities. The strategy worked, but was poorly named. Nixon's win was national, and its most visible new adherents were manifestly northern--union-affiliated former Democrats known loosely as "hardhats."
>The White House lived by the principles of the southern strategy, and Dent's office had its own lingo. There were issues that mattered to "our" people, and those that mattered to "their" people. "Their" people were what the White House called "the young, the poor, and the black." The phrase rolled off the tongue like one word: theyoungthepoorandtheblack. The young were the longhaired student antiwar types for whom the president had open and legendary contempt; the poor and the black were leftover concerns from the Great Society.
>Brownell daily read a dozen newspapers from around the country and clipped stories that played on those themes. He looked for stories about badly managed social programs, watched for currents of localized resentment, combed the columns for colorful quotes and juicy anecdotes the presidential speechwriters might use. He particularly kept an eye out for drug stories. Drugs were one thing the young, the poor, and the black all seemed to have in common.
If you're interested and want a further read on the subject I highly recommend checking out The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It's an incredibly informative and well-researched discussion of this exact issue. While the book and author have received some fair criticism, it is still very thought provoking and should encourage you to "think about mass incarceration in a new way."
Mass detention already goes on
Check out The New Jim Crow. Their numbers absolutely do matter. And we absolutely should not be removing the right of citizens to vote based on laws written by those that benefit from removing those citizens right to vote.
Please read The New Jim Crow.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1595581030/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?pc_redir=T1
Read this first
The justice system is utterly broken. From top to bottom.
You're launching into odd free speech strawman arguments when I never said white people shouldn't be able to talk about race. I'm only saying that on this topic, white people should consider their inexperience and measure their comments out of respect for furthering the discussion in a meaningful way. It doesn't mean "don't say anything." It means come at it as a person trying to learn something rather than a person who believes he's automatically equally qualified on the matter. It would be like me talking to a physicist about dark matter and pretending I'm his equal. I just wouldn't come at a physicist like that in a discussion because I recognize my own inexperience.
Also, I strongly disagree with you that colorblindness will ever result in a substantially positive change for minorities. I've been reading material regarding race relations, academic and not, for nearly eight years and it only reinforces the idea of deep systemic inequality. The playing field is not level right now, and it will never become level by not talking about the problem or attempting to actively solve it. The more you learn, the clearer it gets.
Here's a book to get you started on systemic inequality for blacks: http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
If you think the War on Drugs is fucked up now, wait until you read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
If books aren't your thing, there's a ~1hr talk from the author free on iTunes (Ep. 98) where she pretty much sums up the entire book. Makes for a good listen at the gym or in the car.
I was always opposed to the War on Drugs based on my libertarian beliefs, but after reading that book, it really makes me sick to my stomach.
> Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
Drug use rates are very similar between blacks and whites, but the far majority of those targeted for by The War on Drugs are people of color. Her book really makes you sick when you find out why. ಠ_ಠ
>So racism is a combination of that inherent distrustfulness, tied together with cultural stereotypes about different groups. So maybe we'll never be truly rid of racism; the best we can do is teach our children about these negative thoughts, and learn to examine those thoughts for real truth.
I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you on this point. While there is certainly a personal aspect to racism, to reduce it to a mere combination of "inherent distrustfulness" and "cultural sterotypes" is to ignore the vast systemic issues that constitute true racism. Under your definition, only persons can be racist. How then are we to critique - for example - the carceral state in America, in which blacks are imprisoned at a significantly higher rate than whites. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009.[41] According to the 2010 census of the US Census Bureau blacks (including Hispanic blacks) comprised 13.6% of the US population. (Elizabeth Anderson recently wrote a very well argued book on this issue)
Any constructive discussion of race in America (which I am attending to specifically, forgive me if you are a non-American, it is the area in which I am familiar) must, necessarily, attend to systemic issues of economic exploitation, cultural devaluation, and political disenfranchisement as well as the personal prejudice and cultural stereotypes that underlie individual participation (not to discount apathy and fear, which play a significant role) in the maintenance of a system of racial domination.
Some critical race theorists whose work I find very prescient are David Theo Goldberg and Charles Mills.
(thanks for jump starting the conversation by the way, it is much appreciated)
Edit: realized they were Aussies, but I find that the point about focusing on individual prejudice rather than systemic oppression still stands.
Pretty sure he's doing this because his life is already over. He has a long rap sheet. The system only creates criminals, it does not rehabilitate them. Life outside is probably worse to him. And it's all on your dime.
So maybe adjust your attitude about how our system works?
You may have read it already, but this book (http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030) covers grounds similar to those your post does.
I don't know anyone who has been incarcerated, so until reading it I had no sense of the magnitude of the problem, or (though I knew that black and Aboriginal people were disproportionately over-represented in prisons) of the degree to which the current legal system amplified/perpetuated structural racism.
Stunningly fucked up situation.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander
Ahem, please broaden your perspective, maybe start here: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521228567&sr=1-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow
let me take a stab at it.
the thing is, africans brought to this country helped to build it. the u.s. would literally not exist as it does today without blacks.. they are as american as apple pie and yet many feel, for reasons like this, that they are not welcome in this country. at the same time there is a pride and a yearning for a connection to a land from which they were displaced. how to bridge these two feelings is tricky and it's something that only each person can decide for themselves.
but having brought them here some 400 years ago and having maintained their domination over them since, (again, read this) it's really not appropriate for white people, as a whole, to outline the contours of black identity. whether in how they name their children, how they dress, what they eat, whatever. even with the best of intentions, chances are that whites will step in it. Black History Month is well and good in one sense (again, the pride thing) but it also helps to highlight the subjugated position blacks have in this country for the rest of the year (the domination thing).
oh and generally speaking, slavery's having happened a long time ago doesn't mean anything. thought experiment: suppose blacks had been paid for their labor? suppose, with that income, they'd been able to own property and build wealth in greater numbers? suppose they'd passed that wealth down through generations? suppose the reconstruction hadn't happened to thwart whatever post-slavery economic progress was possible?
the point is the effects of slavery are still trickling down. and it's galling to have it glossed over the way that it is in this country. an honest accounting and an end to institutionalized racism would be healthy for the entire country, yet a modern president can't even suggest that he might apologize on the country's behalf for racism without a shitstorm.
so suggestions for animal print clothing to celebrate black pride from what i assume is a school with a majority-white administration is just dumb.
In a similar vein, what do you think of the suggestion in this book and others that the for-profit mass incarceration system is an intentional system of racial control? When I see prisoners in for-profit private prisons for nonviolent crimes that everybody commits but only the poor get arrested for, it seems to me black men are in an even worse situation than under the old slavery system.
For those of us who aren't Canadian cell phones
The criminalization of counter culture and free thinkers is just a happy side effect of the effort to implement a formally colorblind but effective racial caste system.
Seriously, read this book http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
The opponents of civil rights simply shifted their focus into being "tough on crime." This obsession with so called 'law and order' has been massively successful in its aim, even civil rights democrats embraced it.
You can read about it yourself.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
Sounds good but in practice...
In reference to stop and frisk tactics in New York:
> Weapons were seized in 1.0 percent of the stops of blacks, 1.1 percent of the stops of Hispanics, and 1.4 percent of the stops of whites.
> Contraband other than weapons was seized in 1.8 percent of the stops of blacks, 1.7 percent of the stops of Hispanics, and 2.3 percent of the stops of whites.
First result when I googled "stop and frisk success rate"
The downright low success rates of these tactics were detailed in the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
It is racist when you don't consider why it occurs and, instead, associate it with blackness and black culture when, in fact, it has more to do with poverty, policing, and racialized, if not flat out racist, policy and policy enforcement.
I'd check out some books like The New Jim Crow, The Condemnation of Blackness, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door, Punishment and Inequality in America, Prisons of Poverty, and Punishing the Poor. I know of very few criminologists who would say that crime is a racial thing, instead, it is the enforcement of crime that is racial and it is the income disparity between blacks and whites that causes us to see higher rates of crime amongst blacks in America.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/blacks-white-racism-united-states-polls/index.html
This shows the divide.
This is a full study on it from pew.
http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-and-discrimination/
This speaks about police and justice reform that is needed
https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
This talks about racism that happens to Asian people.
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessing-white-flight-from-an-asian-ethnoburb
And if you would like to educate yourself more about race in the US.
these books are a great start
Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
So You Want to Talk About Race
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
I see where this convo is going. And I will reference you to literature that will help for you to expand your knowledge on race and class in this country. There isn’t a reddit post in the world that can wholly give you the full picture on what’s wrong with race in America but these books give you a great starting point. Good luck.
there's all sorts of literature about living in a "post-racial" society. "the new jim crow" by michelle alexander comes to mind.
This is a cool article...you all should also take a look at this book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness.". It also says a lot about this issue.
If anyone is interested in how the War on Drugs is wrong and the criminal justice is flawed, read The New Jim Crow. Excellent book.
Thanks for the response.
Then let me be clear, I think the country has made great strides in the last 50 years. But, we still do have state racism within our justice system. If you are interested in learning more about the role of institutionalize racism, I encourage you to read
As for the genes of Black Americans, they are still an estimated 80% African on average.
If anyone thinks racism is gone, check this book out. It's not an affiliate link, just want to spread awareness.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
Is this when we all share our anecdotes and draw conclusions about the ideal behavior from them?
Seriously, this depends on
Without a study with significant sample size, we're more or less just full of it. As of now all I can say statistically is to hope you're white (sorry, but it's true). Those links are lazy searches, but there are good books that support it.
Anyway, this is just one of those things which in the absence of good empirical data you just have to play to your strengths. If you don't know the law (and you should, the basics aren't hard) then perhaps the honesty attempt will help with nice cops, there are certainly anecdotes to support that. If you geek out about the difference between detainment and arrest, do your best lawyer impression.
Read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness for details, it is very thorough, well sourced and the reasoning is very sound.
The two main ways (but not limited to) that laws are selectively applied to people of color are related to drug possession laws and forfeiture laws.
The basic premise is that studies have shown time and time again that white people use drugs at approximately the same rate or higher than people of color, yet the laws are highly disproportionately applied to people of color.
Forfeiture is another form of disproportionate application of law, where people are profiled by the police and are then searched under threat of violence and then the police take their cash.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want another good book that explains the scam in an even broader historical context then try reading The Peoples History of the United States.
The new Jim Crow.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581030/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_b3qXDb6P83MCC
Have you seen this? The New Jim Crow
Here ya go.
This book: http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310162075&sr=8-1
has done all the research for you. I have read this book, and it is quite an eye opener. Also, all her research is cited in the appendix. It's very thorough. If you have the time to read it, I highly recommend it.
>Wherever he is getting his statistics from, they are flawed.
He cited this book for that statistic:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
>Its always irritating how they say that Ron Paul is doing things for the black community by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. As if the whole nonviolent drug community is completely black.
Because this is totally what they're saying. Read a book why don't you.
It's still about skin color. The New Jim Crow is a fact. Blacks are an oppressed underclass and retarded ignorant fools like you don't want to recognize it or investigate it or face reality because of your latent racism.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
Go read that and see if you can keep repeating the bullshit you've been spewing.