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.”
Forrest Palmer is a native of Los Angeles, California who is now an electrical engineer residing in Houston, Texas.
Atlanta is no mecca for Black people. It is a political plantation where the white overseers rule. Fani Willis’ prosecution of Black teachers was an awful example of the power dynamic in that…
Thomas Sankara, radical leader and martyr of Burkina Faso, understood that the problem of ecological destruction was rooted in capitalism and imperialism.
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Acts of police brutality and other forms of misconduct are common throughout the country. The East Bay Area of California is exceptional only in that some officers have been indicted for a…
