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 1971 interview with the late Charlene Mitchell reminds us of both the need for Black radical struggle against capitalism, militarism, and racism, and the contradictions of inter-racial organizing…
Ajamu Baraka representing BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team was invited to serve as part of an international delegation on a historic “humanitarian Caravan” between January 17 and the 21st to the Indigenous…
The US is like a drug dealer getting high on his own supply. It believes in its hype of exceptionalism and endangers the world when it is thwarted in any way.
The narrative of famine in the Tigray region of Ethiopia was repeated uncritically by the media and was amplified by people who were on board with the U.S. regime change plot against the…
