Part One of this interview appeared here, in the January 6 issue of BAR. On January 20, BAR will begin publishing excerpts from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [The New Press].
“Mass incarceration has turned the Black community against itself,” says Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Black Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Mainstream organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights put out laundry lists of proposed reforms, while failing to make America’s Black Gulag a priority. “If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration,” says the veteran civil rights lawyer, “and if our advocacy does not upset the prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system, none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial equilibrium.”
Juneteenth was a people's holiday with deep meaning for the descendants of enslaved people. But the declaration of an official federal holiday has turned it into an opportunity for corporate…
With its recent historic loss of the Parliament majority, the African National Congress has formed a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, heir to the old apartheid regime, demonstrating its…
Newly elected President Bola Tinubu, the Chair of ECOWAS, has mounting political problems while advocating military intervention in neighboring Niger.
Jay Z has consistently shown himself willing to be used as a Black face to run cover for conservative political endeavors. He is now promoting a voucher program that will reduce funding for…
The undemocratically imposed bourgeois political misleaders in Haiti must be understood as tools of imperialism that have led the country into its ongoing crisis.
