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.”
Camila Escalante is an editor for Kawsachun News and a Latin America correspondent for Presstv.
Anne Venhuizen is an attorney in The Bronx Defenders' Impact Litigation Practice.
Christopher Bruce is Policy Director of the Georgia ACLU.
On September 11 remember how legal rights were destroyed under the Patriot Act and how plots for worldwide endless war were hatched.
The September 11, 1973 overthrow of Chile’s Salvadore Allende offers lessons to Haiti, and the radical world.
