“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
Democrats keep telling us that Jim Crow is a ghost of the past, but the Supreme Court's latest ruling proves otherwise.
Tennessee just erased its only majority-Black voting district. Anger is justified but the deeper question is what Black people can do to gain and hold on to real power.
Two car companies are being sued for continuing the southern tradition of exploiting incarcerated workers in Alabama and Georgia factories.
The Chadian troops arriving in Haiti are the visible arm of imperialist intervention in which the United States projects force without putting its own boots on the ground.
Two weeks before, the armed forces had fought off the highly coordinated attacks on six cities by about 12,000 jihadist and separatist fighters on April 25.
