|
4c53967
|
racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
dfd1ced
|
Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
447cce7
|
The rhetoric of 'law and order' was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often c..
|
|
racism
civil-rights-movement
law-and-order
southern-governors
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
6ecd802
|
Mass incarceration--not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement--is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today--i.e., the widespread belie..
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
58e3bc2
|
Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws - which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks - and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay. One vagrancy act specifically provided that 'all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen' must hav..
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
6d37403
|
U.S. District Judge William W. Schwarzer, a Republican appointee, is not known as a light sentencer. Thus it was that everyone in his San Francisco courtroom watched in stunned silence as Schwarzer, known for his stoic demeanor, choked with tears as he anguished over sentencing Richard Anderson, a first offender Oakland longshoreman, to ten years in prison without parole for what appeared to be a minor mistake in judgment in having given a ..
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
05f93d1
|
Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order. Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell show in their research how the media imagery surrounding cocaine changed as the practice of smoking cocaine came to be associated with poor blacks.35
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
9f5123d
|
However, as legal scholar David Cole has observed, "in practice, the drug-courier profile is a scattershot hodgepodge of traits and characteristics so expansive that it potentially justifies stopping anybody and everybody."29 The profile can include traveling with luggage, traveling without luggage, driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs repairs, driving with out-of-state license plates, driving a rental car, driving with "misma..
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
c115a49
|
Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has of..
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
188cdc0
|
Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor. In W.E.B. Du Bois's words: "The Codes spoke for themselves. . . . No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil."14" --
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |
|
ac0bf17
|
T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. --W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America For
|
|
|
Michelle Alexander |