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


  • Sarah B.
    Gaza to Donbass: How Israel and Ukraine Built a Fascist, Transnational War Machine
    10 Sep 2025
    From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, an axis of ethno-supremacy is rising, fueled by U.S. backing. Same guns. Same flags. Same ideology. Gaza and Donbass are not separate wars. They are one machine.
  • Mohamad Elmasry
    Israel's attack on Qatar should be a wake-up call for the Arab world
    10 Sep 2025
    The strike on Doha shows that Arab regimes' silence and passivity in the face of Israeli violence will only invite further aggression.
  • x
    North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights
    Inequality in Kenya: View from Kibera
    02 Sep 2025
    Poverty i
  • x
    The Editors
    Black Agenda Report Will Return on September 10, 2025
    02 Sep 2025
    Black Agenda Report will return with our next issue on Wednesday, September 10. Please watch our new video, "Inequality in Kenya: View From Kibera," produced in collaboration with the North-South…
  • asdf
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    Katrina Victims: Relocated or Forced into Exile?
    27 Aug 2025
    Black Agenda Report's late Executive Editor, Glen Ford, gave this interview a decade after Hurricane Katrina to explore how the narrative of "starting over" is being used to whitewash the forced…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us