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.”
‘Anti-Communism Week’ is a legal blueprint for crushing dissent. By labeling social justice activism as terrorism and empowering a new national task force, the state is preparing for the most intense…
Kenya is auctioning its sovereignty to foreign powers. The final item on the block is the genetic data of its own people.
The West's concept of human rights has always justified imperialism. The People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework offers a radical alternative—a practical tool for oppressed people to define their…
U.S. immigration policy is the domestic arm of its foreign policy. The attack on Haitian migrants is a direct consequence of Washington's ongoing war on Haiti's sovereignty, making their defense a…
Venezuela's revolution is a project of Afro-descendant empowerment and a force against imperialism that has long exploited the African diaspora and the Global South.
