“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,” says Ms. Alexander, a longtime civil rights lawyer. The U.S. national policy of mass incarceration has created an underclass that “is better understood as an undercaste – a lower class of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains a racial hierarchy much like the earlier [Jim Crow and slavery] systems of control.”
Click the player below to hear part one of this Black Agenda Report interview.
Black Mass Incarceration: The Big Payback, a BAR Interview with Michelle Alexander
“While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal.”
High-profile X podcaster and Elon Musk protégé Mario Nawfal recently produced some slick propaganda with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. His team repeatedly asked me to record a six-minute response…
"State of the Union—or state of Capitalist decay?" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
A class consciousness among the working masses, one that takes the issue of race seriously, is critical at this moment. Still, the democrats are working to disrupt this effort to organize against the…
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Atiya Husain. Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College…
