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.”
Brooke Floyd is co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People's Advocacy Institute.
The latest Donald Trump indictment is no cause for celebration. The oligarchs still rule, the military industrial complex still gets public money, the criminal justice system he now faces is still…
A letter commemorating George Jackson speaks to the origins of Black August.
Black August is an important month of political education, but it should not solely be about the past. The continued existence of a mass incarceration state targeting Black people…
