“Mass incarceration – not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement – is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement,” says Ms. Alexander, a longtime civil rights lawyer. The U.S. national policy of mass incarceration has created an underclass that “is better understood as an undercaste – a lower class of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains a racial hierarchy much like the earlier [Jim Crow and slavery] systems of control.”
Click the player below to hear part one of this Black Agenda Report interview.
Black Mass Incarceration: The Big Payback, a BAR Interview with Michelle Alexander
Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the UK-based Morning Star, the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world. He joins us from Oxford to discuss the politics of a growing…
The investigation of the 1965 assassination of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Malcolm X, was compromised by the NYPD and the FBI from the very beginning by informants, coverups, false testimony, and the…
The United Nations has once again acted against the interests of the Haitian people in approving yet another military occupation under the guise of humanitarian action.
Today, we launch Sovereign Media, an anti-imperialist coalition bringing together voices from the Global South and the Global North who refuse to bow to censorship or empire.
Donald Trump has declared war on the “enemy within” and put the military on notice that they will mete out the same treatment domestically that they dispense around the world.
