I came into this book, after having read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and a few other things that I can’t immediately recall, thinking that the basic premise of this book was an historical fact agreed upon by all knowledgeable people. The CIA helped funnel cocaine into American cities as a way of helping to fund the Contra’s in the 1980s. Whether this was all a concerted effort on the part of the white establishment to intentionally suppress African American agency is an issue […]
A Bit Late to the Party on This One, But Still Relevant
I have had this book on my iPad forever! Seriously, I think I downloaded it before 13th, the Netflix documentary, was even a development idea. I watched 13th last year, and yet it didn’t spur me to pick this up, but after reading The Hate U Give, this felt like a fitting follow up. I remember being very impressed by 13th, but the nice thing about reading this, is that it really gave me the chance to absorb and contemplate everything, rather than being hit […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
A Colorblind Society is an Unjust Society
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and law professor at The Ohio State University. Alexander first encountered the idea of a racial caste system when she saw a poster stapled to a telephone pole declaring that “The Drug War is the new Jim Crow.” At the time she thought it was hyperbole. After working in the criminal justice system for several years, her thinking had evolved from the system has a problem with racial bias to believing that mass incarceration is a “well-disguised system […]