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.”
A freight train derailment brought environmental catastrophe to a small Ohio town. While the circumstances are somewhat unique, events followed a predictable pattern in a country run by and for the…
A 1971 statement shines a bright white light on the long history of Canadian imperialism in the Caribbean.
Omali Yeshitela joins BAR contributors and editors Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley to discuss the FBI's raid on the African People's Socialist Party in July 2022 and what it…
This week’s featured author is Lorgia GarcĂa Peña. Peña is Professor of Latinx Studies at Tufts University. Her book is Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective.
