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 instit...