“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
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson.
While genocide is a clear cause of the democrats' defeat, economic issues are usually mentioned. What lingers behind the significance of the “it’s the economy” narrative?
Tricontinentalism is the lens through which we should analyze the anti-imperialist movement, not only to understand the past but to build the movement against imperialist domination today. of the…
In Africa, the leading forces of capitalism have ruthlessly wielded a neoliberal conception of corruption to undermine states’ sovereignty and open the continent to plunder at the hands of Western…
The United States has escalated its proxy war in Syria with the help of jihadist allies and continues destabilizing the entire West Asia region.
