Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Mass Incarceration: The Big Payback, a BAR Interview with Michelle Alexander. Part 1 of 2
15 Jan 2010
🖨️ Print Article

 

“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


More Stories


  • x
    Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team
    The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns Establishment of Colonial Military Governance Over Haiti by UN Security Council
    03 Oct 2025
    The United Nations has once again acted against the interests of the Haitian people in approving yet another military occupation under the guise of humanitarian action.
  • sovereign media launch
    Sovereign Media
    Anti-Imperialist Coalition Sovereign Media Launches Today
    01 Oct 2025
    Today, we launch Sovereign Media, an anti-imperialist coalition bringing together voices from the Global South and the Global North who refuse to bow to censorship or empire.
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Trump Declares War on the U.S.
    01 Oct 2025
    Donald Trump has declared war on the “enemy within” and put the military on notice that they will mete out the same treatment domestically that they dispense around the world.
  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    Trump “Peace Plan” A Cynical Cover to Continue Campaign of Palestinian Extermination
    01 Oct 2025
    The so-called "peace deal" does not offer peace; it demands surrender. The Trump plan is the manifestation of a colonial logic that believes might makes right.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    LETTER: To My People, Assata Shakur, 1973
    01 Oct 2025
    “There is and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army.”
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us