The New Jim Crow: Initial Thoughts

Nick Miller

The New Jim Crow

Blog Post One

Initial Thoughts

Civil Rights Lawyer Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness has been heralded as a transformative work exposing the horrifying and systemic role of racism in America's criminal justice system since its publication in 2010.  

As I am only 94 pages into the book, it would be unwise for me to draw conclusions about the text as a whole, so I will only give my initial thoughts on what I have read and understood thus far.   

As a general rule, I agreed with most of Alexander's assertions about the racially motivated discrimination that predated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would be both naive and intellectually dishonest to claim that African Americans were not the victims of institutionalized discrimination up until that point. For example, on page 25, she correctly notes that the constitution was, to an extent, designed to protect the institution of slavery that, by nature, oppressed African Americans up until the civil rights act gained traction in the sixties (Alexander 24).  

It is true, then, that up until the civil war and even after its conclusion, American society systematically oppressed blacks through Black Codes and other laws, the effects of which she again correctly claims are still evident today. On page 26, for example, she states that "the main purpose of black codes was to control the freedmen." Restriction to proper education and other public resources that was the inevitable result of black codes, she then later correctly claims, were central in developing inner-city culture and high rates of crime in the black community.  

In short, Alexander's first arguments were centralized around the correct idea that past American discrimination against - and oppression of - African Americans had lasting effects, some of which we still see in our society today.  

On these points, I believe that it would be intellectually dishonest to challenge her.  

Put shortly, she is right.  

Where I begin to disagree with Alexander is in her assertion that in 1965 and beyond - after the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act - the majority of conservatives - people like Reagan and George H.W Bush, designed their policies around targeting African Americans through the criminal justice system. 

In many cases, Alexander's evidence is sparse, or she doesn't cite examples of how history supports her claims. For instance, on page 41, Alexander herself concedes that rates of crime in the 1960s rose - what she fails to account for, however, is the extent of that rise. According to the Disaster Center, both overall and violent crime doubled between 1960 and 1968 and continued an upward trend from there.  

Most reasonable minds can agree that if crime doubles in the United States, it constitutes an issue that needs to be addressed. This is why I fundamentally disagree with her assertion on page 42 that the crackdowns on crime that inevitably followed were "conservatives trying to use rising crime as an excuse to crack down on minority communities."

I think that in a situation where crime rises as sharply as it did between 1960 and the end of Reagan's administration in 1989 - it more than quadrupled - it makes sense for lawmakers to respond with efforts to decrease that crime. Alexander then cites one racist lawmaker - George Wallace - and attempts to use his association with segregation to prove that all conservative lawmakers thought as he did, which in my view isn't comprehensive enough to constitute a convincing argument. Her argument would be more effective if she supported it with more specific lawmakers that supported crackdowns on crime, who also had a racial bias.  

After all, anyone who is familiar with statistics knows that you can't prove a trend using only a single case. It just doesn't work that way, and any attempt to do so should be met with extreme suspicion.  

For me to believe in a conservative conspiracy to crack down on minority communities, I need a comprehensive statistic that demonstrates a trend amongst a majority of conservatives who supported new crime laws, not just one man.  

Even though she tended to generalize conservative policy without sufficient empirical or anecdotal evidence before, Alexander's approach to Richard Nixon is more effective.  

On page 47, she cites Richard Nixon as stating, "[crime laws] are all about those damn Negro-Puerto Rican Groups." Because she includes specific evidence, I can definitively support her assertion that Nixon did want to crack down on minority communities. Still, I refuse to condemn all supporters of new crime legislation without more evidence.  

Such a condemnation based on insufficient evidence would be wrong.  

While I support her attack on Nixon, I disagree with Alexander's condemnation of Ronald Reagan. On page 48, she states that Ronald Reagan Condemned "welfare-queens, and criminal predators" and "Rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites." Here, I simply don't believe that Ronald Reagan was using insidious racial language to target minorities.  

I think Reagan was correctly criticizing people who were taking advantage of the welfare system and attempting to rectify a criminal problem in the United States that had quadrupled between 1960 and his first term, which began in 1980. Both of these seem more logical to me than Alexander's explanation, which is that Ronald Reagan was a racist and was attempting to crack down on African Americans - especially in the absence of any contextual evidence. She states that Reagan was "making good on his promise" to "crackdown on the racially defined 'others'" even though her proof for such a characterization is simply not there (Alexander, 49).    

I again take issue with Alexander's characterization that Reagan's "War on Drugs" was racial. She cites a statistic that "Only two percent" of Americans believe that Drugs were the country's most pressing issue as if that is supposed to prove that Reagan only favored it because he wanted to crack down on minorities.  

First, this statistic doesn't mean much. In the cold war era, it is not surprising that most Americans feared Nuclear destruction from the Soviet Union more than a prolific drug problem, and just because people didn't see it as "the most important" issue, doesn't mean the issue itself wasn't relevant. For these reasons, I don't see it as a particularly convincing reason explaining why the war on drugs was racial.  

Not only that, but according to the New York Times, rising levels of drug abuse were of significant concern before Reagan came into office, making his policies not only relevant but essential.  

Contributor Peter Kerr states, "A cycle of widespread drug use that began in the mid-1960s had taken a heavy toll by the early 1980s, leading to a major shift in attitudes against substance abuse..."  

This provides an alternate and vastly more convincing argument than the one Alexander presents, especially because she fails to connect the dots with sufficient or relevant evidence to prove that Reagan's policies were racially motivated.  

Alexander's only evidence for Reagan's racism is on page 49, where he cites the welfare system as a vehicle to "Let some fellow ahead of you buy you a T-Bone steak," which is not racial. Just because African Americans use food stamps disproportionately does not mean that Reagan specifically wished to target them with this attack, which related more to the conservative views on taxes and the role of the federal government in helping the poor. Even so, Alexander cites it as a "highly racialized appeal" without even attempting to explain how.  

Overall, in this section, I think that Alexander connected largely unrelated dots that failed to indicate racial motives on the part of the Reagan administration that were directly contradicted by actual information deriving from credible sources such as the New York Times.  

Jamming irrelevant pieces of information together to make a fundamentally weak and incomplete argument that is mainly predicated on unconfirmed assumptions and political interpretation is not, in my view, very convincing.  

As I previously stated in this blog post, I am perfectly happy to condemn conservative racism when it is presented to me in a cohesive fashion or with adequate explanation and contextualization, as I did with Nixon. What I am not willing to do, however, is read racial motives into quotes like the one Ronald Reagan made concerning public welfare programs that deal more with economics than skin color.  

Conservatives don't oppose expanded welfare because African Americans predominately use it. They oppose it because they feel that unfairly steals money away from people who worked to earn it - regardless of skin tone. 

Overall, I agreed with the vast majority of Alexander's arguments at the beginning of the book that past racism affects society today. However, I did feel that in some instances, her specific assertions were not accompanied by adequate evidence, or she merely used very general statements without supporting them.  

However, I am still very interested in reading the rest of the book, primarily because it deals more with current society as it did towards page 94, and I am thrilled by the prospect of engaging my classmates with differing viewpoints in a discussion of the topics the book raises. Overall, I think it is good for me to read material that I can't entirely agree with because it forces me to reevaluate my positions when necessary or strengthen them when it is not.