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.”
Washington signed agreements for Congo's copper and cobalt while Ebola spread across 67 health zones and medical workers went unpaid for their hazardous labor.
“In a democracy, it’s supposed to be one person, one vote, and the more one person can influence, the less egalitarian our system becomes,” said one expert.
KeShaun Pearson of Memphis Community Against Pollution discusses the struggles against Elon Musk's data center and Memphis' compromised elected officials.
In this week’s segment, we discuss Brazil's presidential election, where the incumbent president secured victory after losing in the first round of voting. But we begin with a conversation about an…
Robert Wilson analyzes Lula da Silva's comeback from defeat in the first round of voting in Brazil's presidential election.
