Greg Thomas offers up a strong and important critique of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Michelle Alexander’s book has taken many by storm and been credited by many as reigniting an important discussion around the hyper incarceration of Black and Brown communities. But what histories does the book omit or distort? What politics are used to interpret the subject? And what of the book’s suggested solutions to the crisis and associated crises?
Greg Thomas
WHY SOME LIKE THE NEW JIM CROW SO MUCH:
Michelle Alexander is unlike “Some Radical Group[s]” who must be “Crazy” & “Absurd”
“This book is not for everyone.”
– Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)
Riveted on “skeptics,” Michelle Alexander writes of “three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States today” in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). She will never label them “white,” or “white-supremacist,” or “colonialist.” Yet this “United States” remains a setter colony and, now, a super empire, still. Nor will she call the ‘latest’ system (of “control”) “racist,” or even a system of “racial hostility.” She labels these three systems “mass incarceration,” “Jim Crow” and “slavery” (Alexander 2012, 14). These labels are quite critically loose. By “slavery” she could only mean antebellum chattel slavery. For many slaveries thrive up into the 21st century, including penal slavery itself, globally as well locally. It is not clear why the colloquial term “Jim Crow” is the second term of choice. E. Franklin Frazier would remind us that the architects of segregation conceived of Black populations as “unfit for human association” – not merely “inferior,” “subordinate,” or “criminal.” Does Alexander comprehend this system; this North American apartheid, well beyond “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs, symbolically? Does “mass incarceration” describe the entire condition of Black oppression under the current era of white racist rule or, no doubt, one centrally important element of it? How much or how little can be revealed about white racist oppression and the Black condition of oppression via polite, generic euphemisms like “racialized systems of control,” moreover?
Later, The New Jim Crow will read in the title chapter of the text: “It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)” (219). An ‘evolutionary’ model of analysis should raise all kinds of questions. How distinct, if at all, are Black historical experiences of “exploitation,” “subordination” and “marginalization,” which is to say, is there supposed to be no “subordination” or “marginalization” under antebellum chattel slavery; little “exploitation” or “marginalization” under “Jim Crow” or de jure segregation; and no defining features of “exploitation” or “subordination” in the context of “mass incarceration,” in actual truth? Why set up a basic conceptual framework that is so basically flawed? Lastly, for starters, why should “The New Jim Crow” continuation of “Jim Crow” of old not also be a “New Slavery,” or “Neo-Slavery,” since “Jim Crow” of old did reformulate antebellum chattel slavery itself in such scandalous ways? Where is the “slavery” of penal slavery in The New Jim Crow? Is the “Jim Crow” privileged here more comforting than the many slaveries of our past and present – to whom, and for what ‘evolutionary’ approach to history in the African Americas? Has this book been questioned at all?
“AUDIENCE” vs. “EVERYONE”
Apart from a curious subtitle, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow contains a very curious “Preface” and a potentially shocking set of “Acknowledgements” – where she identifies her husband as a federal prosecutor. This is before its general argument ever gets under way. But does anybody really read this text, or any text, these days in particular? This is a minted book, a “hot commodity.” There are three pages of blurbs or endorsements from some of the most establishment newspapers and media figures in North America, prior to the title page of the “revised edition” which now boldly in 2012 boasts “A New Foreword” by a commercial academician, “Cornel West.” For so many, it has quickly become a standard reference in contemporary commentary on prisons (or “mass incarceration”). This New York Times Best Sellers-style commodification certainly demands critical discussion itself, especially since uncritical consumers of The New Jim Crow include a number of political audiences which the author could not possibly have in mind. After all, if we skip the brand-name “Foreword,” her “Preface” begins, curiously: “This book is not for everyone.”
The author writes that she has “a specific audience in mind” and proceeds to list several contrasting audiences in suspiciously vague terms. First, there are “people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration.” You may be left to wonder who can fail to “appreciate” the facts of “mass incarceration” and, relatedly, how they could still demonstrate their deep and apparently unquestionable concern for “racial justice” at the same time. At any rate, Alexander says she is writing in this case “for people like me,” herself, or “the person she was ten years ago.” Secondly, there are “those who have been struggling to persuade” others, or those “who have lacked the facts and data to back up their claims.” Allegedly, these people know the deal regarding “mass incarceration,” unlike Alexander of ten years ago; they instead, somehow, lack information, unlike Alexander of today, allegedly. Third, and finally, there are those who are prisoners themselves: “I am writing this book for all those trapped within America’s latest caste system. You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society, but you are not forgotten” (xiii). Is the problem of “mass incarceration” one of forgetting? This is how Alexander’s one-paragraph preface ends. The wording suggests that she is not writing for this “audience” to read and critically analyze her writing – not at all; this would be a writing on their behalf, so to speak, whoever these theoretical prisoners are in her view, en masse, whose goal in her view would be to get out of prison and into “mainstream society.” You may be left to wonder where are the prisoners who have other political-ideological desires and far from “mainstream” intellectual traditions of their own, not only in this “Preface,” but in The New Jim Crow as a whole.
If this book is “not for everyone,” then who is “everyone” exactly? Who is the excepted ‘non-audience’ of The New Jim Crow, by its own, awfully indirect admission? How does this affect its form as well as content? Alexander uses no racial signifiers to describe her intended audience for a book on “racial caste.” From the outset, this is one of many “racial taboos” she will not think of violating as a writer and lawyer grounded in mere liberal reformism, simple “civil rights” liberalism. The actually implied audience of the text is a provincial white and middle-class audience for whom any anti-racist talk that is too Black or too radical is an abomination. Others may buy the book and advertise it for her and The New Press. But any hint of such Blackness or such radicalism is actively and aggressively barred from The New Jim Crow, like “barbarians at the gate” of an ironically Negrophobic analysis.
“Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions,” wrote George L. Jackson in Blood in My Eye (1972) or “On Withdrawal” (Jackson 1990, 125). (I can quote this text; this figure; this context. My audience is Black … and anyone who can read without the need to eliminate or whitewash Blackness from their universe of reading, writing and meaning.)
A former prisoner himself, Huey P. Newton wrote in “Prisons” (1969) of two types of prisoners, famously, the “illegitimate capitalist” and the “political prisoner.” The first type was dubbed so because they had tried to acquire everything or something that capitalism defines as “legitimate,” while the capitalist elite defines their attempt to participate in the world of exploitation as “illegitimate” – or “crime.” The second type “argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top…. Thus, this second type of prisoner says that the society is corrupt and illegitimate and must be overthrown.” “They do not accept the legitimacy of the society and cannot participate” in its corrupting exploitation – or in what Alexander instinctively embraces as “the mainstream,” “whether they are in the prison or on the block” (Newton 1995, 219).
The BPP co-founder’s legendary hero, George Jackson often spoke of the “inside” prison and the “outside” prison. The world’s most famous political prisoner ever, perhaps, he spoke of all imprisonment and all prisoners as either “political prisoners” or prisoners of a specific political order, a specific political economy. The 20th century’s most powerful theorist of “neo-slavery,” not merely “Jim Crow” segregation, he wrote in Soledad Brother (1970), no less famously: “After one concedes that racism is stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life in general (the definition of fascism is: a police state wherein the political ascendancy is tied into and protects the interests of the upper class – characterized by militarism, racism, and imperialism), and concedes further that criminals and crime arise from material, economic, sociopolitical causes, we can then burn all of the criminology and penology libraries and direct our attention where it will do some good” (Jackson 1994, 18).
The Freedom Archives describes him the “leading theoretician of the modern prison [or anti-prison] movement” in Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation (2002). Yet there will be no memory or mention of him or Huey Newton or the Black Panthers … or any prisoner movement … or the Black Power or Black liberation movement … or any of the globalizing social movements of the 1960s and ’70s at all in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She will indeed “forget” them (i.e., their activism, their critical ideas and ideals), for the benefit of her rhetorically masked audience (which is assuredly a reflection of herself). Who can afford to overlook this ideological sleight of hand, this censorship – in the name of the Black masses?
In her “Introduction” to The New Jim Crow, the keywords are imperial buzzwords like “Founding Fathers,” “democracy,” and “reform,” not to mention “Obama.” The only political organizations of note are the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Urban League. No others can be mentioned or taken seriously, for serious mention might lead some from thinking “reform” to thinking “resistance” or what Harold Cruse famously referred to as “rebellion or revolution.”
Pivotally, Alexander traces the origins of her book and its title to a flyer she saw on the street years ago: “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW,” it read. Her response was, she says, dismissive: “Some radical group” was holding a community meeting. She “sighed” and “muttered” to herself: “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.” She headed to her new job as “director of the Racial Justice Project” of the ACLU, which is by no means “some radical group” (Alexander 2012, 3). Its members are “people,” the quasi-generic “people” of Alexander’s target audience; and they are not “absurd” or “crazy.” The radicals implied by this story are invoked anxiously, sparsely and pejoratively in the remainder of this “Introduction” as “activists” and “conspiracy theorists.”
Unlike “people,” or her “racial justice advocates” of liberal reformism (19), they will never have individual or organizational names, let alone books, articles or position papers, to be cited or engaged in any manner, even though they have provided Alexander with the very idea and title for her first and highly commercialized book (along with all of its perks on lecture circuits, cable television shows, etc.). Quiet as its kept, the thought of radicals, old or new – the thought of being affiliated or associated with “unreasonable” radicals and their “crazy,” “absurd” thoughts, this haunts Alexander’s The New Jim Crow from beginning to end.
“HISTORY”
The first chapter, “The Rebirth of Caste” is a rewriting of history — U.S. history, the only history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the world. It moves first from “The Birth of Slavery” to “The Death of Slavery,” despite the fact that “slavery” does not ‘die.’ Indeed, Alexander first lauds the “achievement” of the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, for “abolishing slavery” (29), and only belatedly concedes that it reframed or rearticulated slavery instead of abolishing it. For “slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime” (31). In the following section, “The Birth of Jim Crow,” she cites work by two white historians, David Oshinsky’s “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996) and Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (2008), as if their formulations do not contradict her critical framework and easy historical periodization. They come behind George Jackson’s work on “neo-slavery” in Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye in any case. The next section in Alexander’s chapter is entitled “The Death of Jim Crow,” although this titling contradicts the core argument of The New Jim Crow. The final section, “The Birth of Mass Incarceration” begins with the late 1950s and concentrates on “the Civil Rights Movement” before suddenly and very strangely leaping into the 1980’s of Ronald Reagan and the U.S government’s so-called “War on Drugs.” Nothing noteworthy is supposed to happen in the interim, such as the Black Power Movement (which marked the radical limitations of this “Civil Rights Movement,” of course) and all of the other radical movements of the late 1960s and ‘70s. Magically disappeared are the Black Panther Party (BPP), George Jackson and the prison-based movement he led which burst into the Attica Rebellion as well as various and sundry international and trans-racial solidarities of world historical significance. This is not simply a “forgetting,” to be certain. From this first chapter on forwards, their literature on prison and from prison (systems of racial and social “control,” in Alexander’s parlance) is written out of The New Jim Crow’s rewriting of history as well – U.S. history, the only official history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the Western and non-Western world.
The stage is set for this popular “study” to be completed within the trap of settler nationalist thought, early 1950s style; the settler nationalist thinking of elite cries for liberal legal reform; the settler nationalism that is white nationalism “by another name,” or the throwback integrationist’s white “majoritarian,” white-supremacist nationalism of U.S. colonialism and imperialism – all slavery, “Jim Crow” apartheid and neo-slavery aside.
For this “Americanism,” as Malcolm X classically and crucially framed it, Alexander cites everything but traditions of Black political and even academic radicalism in The New Jim Crow. Bibliographically, she may be most fond of making reference to Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project and wily French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. Michael Omi and Howard Winant are safe, in passing, despite their indebtedness to more radical social movements, which they deflect for North American sociology themselves. Alexander can quote Iris Marion Young academically and, for a second, Marilyn Frye insofar as she is not introduced as a white radical lesbian feminist. As hallmarks of electoral or U.S. Constitutional liberalism, Derrick Bell as well as Gerald Torres and Lani Guinier find a place in The New Jim Crow, too. So do, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and some early-iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, all quite predictably. And then there is Glenn Loury, the ex-conservative economist and former Reagan-appointee who was “born again” as a “progressive” (liberal) after public and legal charges of battery and drug addiction led to his resignation from Harvard University and the arch-conservative spotlight. He is far from off limits in The New Jim Crow, but all Black radicalism is completely out of bounds. Totally silenced and more “invisible” for her text than even Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), it’s farther out than “Mars.”
There is no Malcolm X in Alexander’s history here, either, even though he exists before Alexander employs her narrative time machine to leap from the mid-1960s to Reagan’s 1980s over the later, radical 1960s and early 1970s. How could she speak of the man who told his audience, famously: “Don’t be shocked when I say that I was in prison. You’re still in prison. That’s what America means: prison,” in the face of her audience? What kind of history of “Civil Rights” can be written without him, his own emergence from prison and his spectacular critical commentary on “Civil Rights” without “Human Rights” or Pan-Africanism?
Just a few moments of his classic oratory would undermine the entire voice of The New Jim Crow. His “Message to the Grassroots” (1963) speaks to the grassroots, fearlessly, not about them. What Alexander praises as the “March on Washington,” Malcolm famously demystifies as the “Farce on Washington” in his critical expose of the “white power structure” and its Negro elite “civil rights establishment” – the “big guns” of “Negro leaders” used against the “Black revolution.” There is, further, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964) on what Alexander repeatedly bemoans as “second-class citizenship: “What do you call second-class citizenship? Why that’s colonization. Second-class citizenship is nothing but 20th century slavery. How are you going to tell me you’re a second-class citizen? They don’t have second-class citizenship in any other government on this earth. They just have slaves and people who are free.” This is why he could decode both “segregation” (or “Jim Crow”) and “integration” as both systems white racist power and control. And whereas Alexander recites the words “our nation” countless times throughout The New Jim Crow, ad nauseam, melodramatizing total emotional allegiance to the U.S. government despite this gargantuan “racial caste system,” Malcolm in “Message to the Grassroots” would respond in advance: “I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about, ‘our government is in trouble.’ They say, ‘The government is in trouble.’ Imagine a Negro: ‘Our government’! I even heard one say ‘our astronauts.’ They won’t even let him near the plant – and ‘our astronauts’! ‘Our Navy’ – that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind!”
To be Black and “out of one’s mind” here is a political as well as psycho-pathological matter and a profound geo-psychiatric evaluation reminiscent of the popular and academic-intellectual work of one Frantz Fanon – from Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Toward the African Revolution (1964).
Many unwitting consumers of The New Jim Crow who could only find themselves erased and rendered “crazy” or “absurd” and “unreasonable” by its rhetoric would also be supporters of Sundiata Acoli, the comrade of Assata Shakur; a present-day political prisoner in his seventies; and the author of an influential article online, “A Brief History of the New African Prison Struggle” (1992). He writes: “This article was first written at the request of the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO). Its original title was ‘The Rise and Development of the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle Behind the Walls’.” The first section of this extensive two-part history, “The 16th Century to the Civil War” begins by looking back further beyond U.S. settler-colonial nationalist historiography: “The Afrikan prison struggle began on the shores of Afrika behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery. It continues today behind the walls of modern U.S. penitentiaries where all prisoners are held as legal slaves – a blatant violation of international law.”
This makes all such prisoners, again, “political prisoners” of some sort.
However, there is no such thing as “political prisoners” – on any definition, broad or narrow – in Alexander’s writing, not in her “Preface,” “Acknowledgements,” “Introduction” or six chapters of The New Jim Crow.
There is no “international law” in Alexander’s legal realm or legal analysis. There is not even a Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world’s most famous political prisoner at this point in time, arguably, and the author of a small library of widely translated books on the politics of prison himself. And “forget” about Assata Shakur politically exiled in Cuba with a $1 million bounty on her head, a “reward” which could be raised to $5 million if the new Attorney General of the State of New Jersey, Jeffery S. Chiesa, has his way with the FBI. If this “nation” (which is not a nation) were “ours,” then no refugee of COINTELPRO (the FBI’s infamous Counter INTELligence PROgram) could be “ours” too. The former “Joanne Chesimard” renames herself “a 20th century escaped slave” and “a Maroon woman,” but there is little to no slavery and no criminal FBI war on Black revolutionaries in The New Jim Crow.
How is this vicious and violent state repression of political “activists” somehow not a part of “The New Jim Crow,” or “America,” for Alexander?
The contrast between Sundiata Acoli’s writing of history and Alexander’s filtering of history is instructive. He proceeds in sections entitled “Post-Civil War to the 20th Century,” “The 20th Century through World War II,” “Post-World War II to the Civil Rights Era,” “The Emergence of Afrikan Nations,” “Origins of the Civil Rights Movement” and “Civil Rights through the Black Power Era,” for example. She truncates history so as to efface or erase “Black Power” in favor of “Civil Rights,” censoring “Black Power” in effect. He, like others, inserts Pan-African Black internationalism into North American historiography and specifies this “Black Power Era’ and a “Black Liberation Era.” He details “Civil Rights Struggles in Prison” and “Religious Struggles in Prison,” “Origins of the New World Nation of Islam” and “Origins of the Five Percenters” as well as how “Black Panthers Usher in the Black Liberation Movement.” Not excluded are “The New Afrikan Independence Movement,” “COINTELPRO Attacks,” “The Rise of Prison Struggles” and “The Black Liberation Army.” His article ultimately closes with a decade-by-decade analysis: “The End of the 70’s,” “The Decade of the 80’s,” and “The 90’s and Beyond.” In short, he does not reduce history after the “Civil Rights Movement” to Ronald Reagan and the U.S. government’s so-called “War on Drugs.”
“WAR” & “DRUGS”
The true subject of The New Jim Crow and each of its chapters is practically this and this alone. The rhetoric of a “War on Drugs” does not share space in Alexander with other language that is basic to other, prior political analyses of Black imprisonment or “mass incarceration.” There is no critical language of “capitalism” or “class” or “exploitation” in The New Jim Crow. A few hesitant references to “financial incentive” or “the profit motive in drug law enforcement” may be found, infrequently, in their place. Not even the often very chic language of a “Prison Industrial Complex” has any presence at all. “Forget” James Boggs’s far more preferable language of a “military-economic-police bloc” in his American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963). The language of “race” and to a lesser extent “racism” is present, but the conceptualization of “race and racism” is in any event weak, narrow, anemic – i.e., liberal. The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is, after all, “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” The state rhetoric of a “War on Drugs” is thus centrally entertained by Alexander without entertaining it as a rhetorical disguise of capitalism, exploitation, militarism, mass/state murder, imperialism or a cultural and “political economy” of white, anti-Black “racism.”
It may be true that “there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.” However, no other “reasons” or pretexts for imprisonment warrant any substantial attention in The New Jim Crow. Alexander concludes: “Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs” (Alexander 2012, 60). She would take Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” rhetoric seriously and lauds his “Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964” (39); and, although she must note more than once that this alleged “War on Drugs” does not target “kingpins,” let alone what we could call narco-trafficking, she still takes this federal rhetoric seriously on its own status-quo terms. Her contemporary interpretation of incarceration and criminalization is then disconnected from the long history of Black criminalization by Anglo-North America which predates the U.S. state formation and includes the white criminalization of enslaved African communities on plantations under official chattel slavery as well as nominally “free” Black communities both in the North and the South in addition to the white criminalization of Black/African-Diasporic communities under de jure or “Jim Crow” segregation or U.S. national apartheid. If, en masse, Black people have more critically catalogued everything from “Driving While Black” to “Breathing While Black” as social “crimes” in this country, historically, the essential, white-defined “crime” of “Being Black” cannot be reduced to a recent, “color-blind” side-effect of the selective prosecution of “drug offenses” at the lowest socio-economic level.
Richard Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) writes in “The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks” (2012): “For brazen criminality, no one tops the bankers. But a banker in jail is as rare as a honest senator.” He reports on the criminal history of Wachovia Bank before its takeover by Wells Fargo with the assistance of billions of dollars in federal funding. That bank was found guilty of “having laundered at least $378 billion … in drug money from 2004-07 for Mexican drug cartels.” To buy planes for the transport of cocaine, these cartels also funneled through Bank of America, which is described as “notorious” for the practice of face-lifting money-laundering with a posture of “legitimacy.” “So, the Wachovia executives, who admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right?” Becker cuts to the chase: “Not one Wachovia executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer.” His point is that “while the government rules over the people under capitalism, the banks rule over the government and the entire system. This will only change when the people take power and put an end to a system of, by and for the super rich.” Nothing like this is accomplished by the liberalism of The New Jim Crow, which never thinks to challenge the establishment definition of “crime” or “criminality.”
“CRIME”
Over and again, Alexander can statistically dispute the notion that Black people commit more “crimes” than white people, yet only in the context of her own unexamined notion of “crime,” “guilt” and “innocence.” She cannot question government or governmental “law.” She categorically states (in “The Lockdown”): “Court cases involving drug-law enforcement almost always involve guilty people. Police usually release the innocent on the street – often without a ticket, citation, or even an apology” (Alexander 2012, 69). So how does she or they determine or manufacture “guilt” versus “innocence” here, except outside the “law” itself which is no doubt an instrument of the powerful and one not normally deployed against “kingpins” or corporations or government? The trial is a formality; her legal system, suddenly, supposedly, infallible. This statement concerning “guilt” is quickly contradicted chapter after chapter by ample evidence of police corruption, racism and profiteering, apart from the legal politics of “snitching” and “plea-bargaining.” At any rate, Alexander’s conventional conception of “crime,” “guilt” and “innocence” as well as “law” and “government” remain essentially undisturbed despite the radical “injustice” of the “racial caste system” that would be “The New Jim Crow.”
There is no state or governmental crime here in The New Jim Crow because the book uses and consolidates the state’s definition or conceptualization of “crime” without question.
This is why she writes of the CIA: “It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence been revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruction of the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into the United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide” (6). In her evaluation of evidence for a target audience that is presumed or expected to know nothing of these matters, there is no discussion of Ollie North’s “Iran-Contra” scandal. There is no mention of Pulitzer-Prize winner Gary Webb or his San Jose Mercury News investigative journalism, or his alleged death by suicide after these exposés effectively ended his career in the corporate-establishment media complex. There is no memory or recall of any other “intentional” state assaults on Black bodies, such as the forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (not to mention its more recently exposed analogue in Guatemala) and many others showcased in Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2006) – before, during and after “Jim Crow” segregation. Nor is there any memory of the whole history of Black movements charging Alexander’s “nation” with genocide before the United Nations. So must William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. and even the eminently quotable W.E.B. Du Bois be “forgiven,” too, as signatories to We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (1951)? And, again, there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the FBI in The New Jim Crow or its “intentional” COINTELPRO “destruction” of Black community “activists,” dissidents, leaders, organizations, etc.
“RACISM” vs. “COLOR-BLINDNESS”
What feeble criticism of racism is possible in this framework? The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is not only strange, it ushers a colossal contradiction, many of which abound page after page, section after section, repetitive chapter after chapter: “Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness” could theoretically make sense in a discussion of “racial caste” or “control,” if by “colorblindness” it was meant “colorblindness” as rhetoric or rationale rather than “colorblindness” as an actual, factual ‘reality’ in North America. But Alexander accepts and affirms her audience’s claim to not ‘see race’ or color; to not be racist; to ‘no longer’ champion a system that can or should be categorized as unambiguously racist in the world-famous tradition of white American racism. Having made this truly strange concession, she must find some way to account for the contemporary existence of “racial caste,” “racial control” or “The New Jim Crow.” The argument could not possibly succeed – for those in Alexander’s target audience who champion “colorblindness” as a ‘reality’ would never speak the language of “racial caste” and those outside her target audience (i.e., “everybody” else) who know the reality of this racial condition could not possibly believe the “United States of America” to be a “colorblind society” or “nation.”
In “The Color of Justice,” her third chapter, Alexander writes as if she wonders: “What, then, does explain the extraordinary racial disparities in our criminal justice system? Old-fashioned racism seems out of the question” (Alexander 2012, 103). She assumes a downright silly dichotomy between racism ‘of old’ and something new that is “racial” but not necessarily “racist,” and this “old-fashioned” racism is supposed to be simple or always straightforward and not misconstrued and underestimated by a simple-minded approach to it.
She construes “racism” as by definition “old” on a rather “old-fashioned” sociological model which construes racism as merely overt, explicit prejudice – a racism that is not guarded or denied, ever. She terms this “the work of a bigot” (103). But ‘bigotry’ is not racism’s contemporary vocabulary; and her racism ‘of old’ was itself often and variously covert or codified and implicit with regard to social-institutional structures as well as individual “prejudices” and “attitudes.” Patriotically, Alexander continues: “Politicians and law enforcement officials today rarely endorse racially biased practices and most of them fiercely condemn racial discrimination of any kind.” Seriously? They may not endorse or expose what they think to be or recognize as their white racism in public, on camera…. Do they “fiercely” condemn racism of any kind – say, against “young Black males” in “hoodies” or Arabs of any kind, anywhere, during their “War on Terror” subterfuges? (Is U.S. imperialism “colorblind,” too, ‘now,’ abroad?) The very thought is an insult to intelligence. Still, Alexander describes “forms of race discrimination that were open and notorious for centuries” as the only form of racism; as “something un-American” now; and as “an affront to our newly conceived ethic of colorblindness.” To hear her tell it, there is a national “anti-discrimination principle” and there has been “a profound shift in racial attitudes” (100). There is no “old” or “new-fashioned” racism in Alexander’s writing, either, even though there is this “mass incarceration” of Black people or “The New Jim Crow.”
Her conclusion will be that racial “indifference and blindness – far more than racial hostility—form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems” (242). You might wonder what other caste systems are studied here, comparatively: none. Or, what impossible explanation is offered to clarify how any country “blind” to race or color could construct a “racial caste system” in the first place, without creating and “seeing” race and color in order to institute it and police it with guns as opposed to “indifference.” You might ask what happens in “all racial caste systems” when the “lower” caste refuses to stay in its designated place (physically, economically, symbolically; individually or collectively) and threatens to upset the hierarchical system of race and caste? Nothing? No. The racist “upper” caste responds as usual with more or other modes of “hostility” and unmitigated violence – which is no doubt the very definition of racism and caste virtually everywhere except in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Besides defining U.S. racism in terms of “a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions,” psycho-socially, George Jackson outlined three different categories of white racism or white racists: the “overt, self-satisfied racist,” the “self-interdicting racist” and the “unconscious racist.” The first in this formulation doesn’t “attempt to hide” his or her antipathy, their hostility. The second “harbors or nurtures racism in spite [their] best efforts.” The third has often little or “no awareness of [their] racist preconceptions” (Jackson 1990, 111). And this analytical grid offered in Blood in My Eye was focused on a consideration of white Leftists – in “Towards a United Front.” What of Alexander’s preferred audience of anti-Communist “Americans” and their morbid fears of Blacks and revolutions?
Her book turns away from a long tradition and a wide range of anti-racist critical frameworks, ones which zero in on “institutionalized racism” and “the political economy of racism” as well as Blood in My Eye’s “overt,” “self-interdicting” and “unconscious” racisms, in the plural. These are precisely the traditions and critical frameworks silently and systematically renounced by Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which like the U.S. corporate media will only see racism when it is overt, “conscious,” “obvious” and, at bottom, publically avowed or confessed. Her “American” racism must always be uniform, static and undisguised – in other words, utterly ridiculous … in retrospect.
One decade and a half before Alexander, David Oshinsky could recall in “Worse than Slavery”: “Racial caste and custom also pervaded the legal system. There were four kinds of law in Mississippi, whites like to say: statute law, plantation law, lynch law, and Negro law. According to S.F. Davis, a prominent Delta attorney and self-described scholar: ‘The judges, lawyers, and jurors all know that some of our laws are to be enforced only against the white people, and others … only against the Negroes, and they are enforced accordingly’” (Oshinsky 1996, 124). Be that as it may, Alexander never ceases to uphold “the law” – in The New Jim Crow – as an abstraction, a “formally colorblind criminal justice system” (Alexander 2012, 103), within which she must find some way to weakly protest the “mass incarceration” of Black people, “nationwide” and on an unprecedented scale.
She has to ‘resolve’ her needless conundrums with crude contradiction. The title chapter of The New Jim Crow counts as many differences between this “new” system and that “old” system as similarities, while at the same time cataloguing as differences what could very easily amount to similarities themselves (191-217). Moreover, having dismissed “racism” and “racial hostility” as historical relics, Alexander explains the “racially discriminatory results” of the present system as emerging from a two-stage process: “The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein.” This is cop racism, “old-fashioned” police racism and racial fascism under white racist “caste.” However, Alexander shirks from calling racism what it is both before and after this or that statement which labels racism “un-American” and white “America” as “colorblind” or currently incapable of racism or “racial hostility.” “Then, the damning step,” she adds: “Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in a racially discriminatory fashion” (103). Subtly, dishonestly, “racially discriminatory” comes to replace “racism” in her rhetoric as if they were not synonymous; and, soon enough, she must concede: “The dirty little secret of policing is that the Supreme Court has actually granted the police license to discriminate” (130). “The Court” licenses the police to practice “racial discrimination” (or persecution and prosecution and imprisonment). The judges of this “Supreme Court” in their own racism license this police racism – although racism no longer exists and is “old-fashioned” according to Alexander. This “dirty little secret” is not “overt” – its targets know it inside out, but its practitioners do not admit it “openly,” so it won’t be recognized as racism or Alexander will offend her target audience. Central contradictions abounding, she must substitute impotent, pathetic euphemisms instead.
Critically, we are returned to George Jackson’s discourse of “masking” or “disguise”: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye’s anti-capitalist examination of racism, neo-slavery and fascism – “updated to disguise” – exceeding narrow periodization or world historical timelines. He wrote to “rip off” the masks. With great timidity, Alexander will briefly refer to her audience’s tendency of “denial” (223). Later, she recalls a study which found that “whites are so loath to talk about race and so fearful of violating racial etiquette that they indicate a preference for avoiding all contact with black people” (238). Translation, for a different audience (that is, for “everyone” else): “…so fearful of having their whiteness and their anti-Black racism exposed, unmasked, and the world as they wish to know it put to an end.” Wearing the proverbial “masks” of Paul Laurence Dunbar in the worst way, Alexander denies the existence and ferocity of white racism as such as much as these whites do. Fearful of violating racist political “etiquette” herself, she covers for them as they yearn for a “colorblind” world which means a world of white power without Black people or Black power. Repressing slavery, neo-slavery and anyone who theorizes it, she never dares to think fascism with “racial caste” or her “racial caste” itself without restraint. On the contrary, she helps disguise racism in a fashion that consolidates it under the cover of “colorblindness” – a way of not seeing which she eventually sees as political liability while still casting it as an actual contemporary reality in North America as opposed to a rhetoric or rationale of white racism itself.
CONCLUSON: COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY “LOVE”
The ultimate expression of law is not order – it’s prison…. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics…. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships…. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me.
– George L. Jackson, “American Justice” / Blood in My Eye (1972)
It should be no surprise that the political action proposed in The New Jim Crow is pitched as a plea for “love,” Christian love, and of course “forgiveness.” In closing, “crazy” and “absurd” “activists” in the distance, this law professor comes to speak the language of “movement,” but only to ask for a “new civil rights movement” (223), in spite of the gross limitations of such liberal reformism and her unrelenting avoidance of every other kind of movement in recent history, nationally and internationally. This is the classic sado-masochistic attachment to white racist Americanism of the Negro or “African-American” elite, the Black “lumpen-bourgeoisie.” The absence of any critical class analysis in Alexander is a reflection of this uncritical paradigm of “civil-rights” reformism, a class-specific liberalism of U.S. settler nationalism in a scorch-and-burn age of U.S. imperialism worldwide.
Her last chapter is entitled “The Fire This Time.” The only James Baldwin in The New Jim Crow is the one attached to the old “civil rights movement.” It is never the one who said the term “civil rights movement” is “an American phrase which … upon examination means nothing at all”; or the one who wrote No Name in the Street (1972) and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); or the one who said in the midst of the Black Power Movement that he had formerly been “the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father.” As an ‘exile’ or ‘expatriate,’ he represented hard and long for George Lester Jackson and the Black Panther Party at large. Nonetheless, politically selective and cliché, Alexander’s reach for The Fire Next Time (1963) cannot envision “revolutionary love” – as a counter-revolutionary love discourse begins and climaxes The New Jim Crow in lieu of any radical political action, or “activism,” of course.
When Alexander writes “Gangsta Love,” a small section of an earlier chapter, “The Cruel Hand,” she makes her second, wildly generalizing reference to “rap” and “black youth.” The first would quote their reference to police “occupation” of “ghetto communities” without recognizing this as a graphic reference to white colonialism or imperialism (123-26). The second apologizes for “gangsta rap” to her white and middle-class audience of peers, or skeptics. ‘Hip-Hop’ is not in her vocabulary; and she shows no knowledge whatsoever of even ‘Hip-Hop Studies.’ In true middle-class fashion, she claims that “gangsta rap” is a case of “black youth” “embracing criminality” and “embracing their stigma” (171). It could not be that there are any values other than white and middle-class values or that “black youth” are embracing instead their cultural rejection of white and middle class values as well as white and middle class conceptions of “crime” or “criminality” quite in the tradition of many revolutionary movements uniformly repressed by The New Jim Crow.
This patronizing, ‘pop-psyche’ treatment of love should call to mind Alexander’s “Acknowledgements,” which your average consumer-reader might very well ignore. There she testifies: “My husband, Carter Stewart, has been my rock…. As a federal prosecutor, he does not share my views about the criminal justice system, but his different worldview has not, even for a moment, compromised his ability to support me, lovingly…. I made the best decision of my life when I married him” (xvi). Is this not “Gangster Love,” alas? That would be the love of a federal prosecutor under the “new” “racial caste system” or “racialized system of control” – especially since Alexander will write that “no one has more power in the criminal justice system than prosecutors” (115), not even judges, some of whom no matter how “conservative” have resigned from the bench rather than collaborate with the grotesque prison politics of mandatory sentencing for the poor and Black or the non-rich and non-white (92-93)? The ruthless gangsterism of the establishment is no less a theme in Hip-Hop, or “rap.” The ‘love of her life’ prosecutes for “The New Jim Crow” and has “read and reread drafts” of her book manuscript (xvi). What is the “Old Jim Crow” equivalent of being wedded or married to a federal prosecutor, while stigmatizing Hip-Hop or “gangsta rap” as a “Minstrel Show” (173-75), in one of the precious few representations of grassroots anything in The New Jim Crow?
Intellectually, it is not just a question of what Michelle Alexander does or does not know here, on the whole. She cites a lot of some scholars (or “people”) and kinds of work. What she doesn’t seem to know may be a great deal, but what she doesn’t want to know and what she doesn’t want her audience to know is much greater. Original insight or info is in reality scarce in The New Jim Crow. Its hides from consumer view other work, “activists” and scholars more insightful and more radical or fearless. For anyone who could read across a range of relatively recent writings alone, like Elaine Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2003); Katheryn K. Russell’s The Color of Crime (1998); Colin Dayan’s Story of the Cruel and Unusual (2004); Mumia Abu-Jamal or Dhoruba Bin Wahad’s contributions to Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (1993), just for example; beyond Angela Y. Davis’s much-touted if ill-conceived Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), all of which are meticulously ignored by Alexander with current radical “activism” and all of the Black and non-Black radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s, there is literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow. “This book is not for everyone,” indeed. Yet a lot of this “everyone” has been buying and supporting it, none the wiser, without raising adequate questions from the perspective of “everyone,” whose lives surely depend on raising questions under this cultural, political economic order of things. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is not for “everyone” because from cover to cover “everyone” except advocates of white and middle-class liberalism – in the imperial context of U.S. settler nationalism – are placed totally and completely beyond the pale. The soundtrack of Richard Wright’s old protest, White Man, Listen! (1957), a virtual parody half a century ago, scratches pitifully in the background.
Greg Thomas is an Associate Professor of Global Black Studies in the English Department at SU. He obtained a Ph.D from the Rhetoric Department at UC-Berkeley and an M.A. from the “Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture” Program at SUNY-Binghamton. Thomas is founder and editor of PROUD FLESH , an e-journal published by African Resource Center. He is also author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Indiana UP, 2007) as well as Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Currently, he is at work on a study of the intellectual politics of George L. Jackson, “The Dragon.”
He can be reached at: gthomas@syr.edu
STUDY GUIDE / 10 Critical Questions:
1. Who is the target audience for The New Jim Crow in truth? How might everyone else read this book as a result?
2. What is the contemporary status of racism, according to the argument? How in the world could it be possible to have a society of “racial caste” and “racial control” without racism or “racial hostility” in fact? Why is the language of whiteness, white racism or white-supremacy never used beyond the ostensibly ‘race-neutral’ language of “racial caste” and “racial control” specifically?
3. How is slavery treated, not treated or under-treated in this book? Does the author pay any or adequate attention to penal slavery, for example, or the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery “as punishment for a crime” in the U.S. Constitution? Why are various slaveries neglected in this “evolutionary” approach to slavery, “Jim Crow” segregation and “mass incarceration,” so to speak?
4. How does the author’s conception of “crime” (or criminality) differ in any way from the ruling class establishment’s conception of “crime” (or “criminality”)? Does she ever dare to question the fundamental function of law, the government or the state, outside its own ideological terms?
5. Does The New Jim Crow have anything critical to say about capitalism, as such, or colonial/neo-colonial imperialism?
6. The author constantly, even manically refers to “our nation” in this narrative, patriotically. What are the political consequences of this settler nationalism – for Black people and, indeed, all subject peoples all over the world? In what ways does her super-patriotism or settler nationalism shape the form, content and perspective of this book?
7. Where are all the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s in the author’s construction of history, not to mention her brand of socio-political analysis? Where is the Black Power movement or Black liberation movements in general? Where are prisoner movements, past and present? Why must they be effaced, “forgotten” or repressed by this particular approach to history and political analysis?
8. How are prisoners themselves represented in this book? Are they ever capable of movements, traditions, intellectualism, or must they always be “spoken for” by others? Can one imagine a George Jackson or an Attica Rebellion here; or a Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kevin Cooper, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson or Adisa Kamara a.k.a Steve Champion in The New Jim Crow? What about Claudia Jones or Assata Shakur? Or is this a kind of “social welfare” approach to prisons and prisoners?
9. What kinds of work by what kind of scholars get cited in this book? What kinds of work by what kind of writers or figures never get cited by this book, even though they so many of them cover so much of the same ground before it and much better? Where are Black radical traditions of political and intellectual inquiry, which have quite famously focused on issues of imprisonment for decades if not centuries?
10. Malcolm X once said that a “liberal” was the most dangerous creature in the Western Hemisphere. How might this statement be applied to the liberalism of Michelle Alexander’s book and its tremendous popularity in the corporate media or white capitalist marketplace?
WORKS
Abu-Jamal, Mumia, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Assata Shakur. Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries. New York: Semiotexte, 1993.
Acoli, Sundiata. “A Brief History of the New African Prison Struggle,” Parts 1 & 2 (1992): http://www.sundiataacoli.org/a-brief-history-of-the-new-afrikan-prison-struggle-parts-1- and-2-19
Alexander, Michelle. [2010] The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Baldwin, James [1972] No Name in the Street. New York: Vintage Press, 2007.
——————-. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
Becker, Richard. “The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks!” Liberation (April 13, 2012): http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-6-no-6/the-real-drug-king-pins.html
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008.
Boggs, James. [1963] American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. New York: Monthly Review, 2009.
—————–. Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Ed. Stephen M. Ward. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011.
Brown, Elaine. [2002] The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Cruse, Harold. [1968] Rebellion or Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Dayan, Colin. The Story of the Cruel & Unusual. Boston, MA: Boston Review. 2007.
Fanon, Frantz. [1952] Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
—————–. [1959] A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Monthly Review, 1967.
—————–. [1961] The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
—————–. [1964] Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
Franklin, E. Franklin. [1957] Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Freedom Archives. Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation [CD], 2002.
Jackson, George. [1970] Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994.
Jackson, George L. [1972] Blood in My Eye. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990.
Mickle, Paul. “New NJ AG: Get Chesimard by All Means Nece$$ary” The Trentonian (2/27/12): http://www.trentonian.com/article/20120227/NEWS/302279981/new-nj-ag-get-chesimard- by-all-means-nece-ary
Newton, Huey P. [1972]. To Die for the People. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2009.
Oshinsky, David M. [1996] “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Patterson, William L. (and the Civil Rights Congress). We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from the Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People. International Publishers, 1951.
Russell, Katheryn K. [1999] The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Micro-Aggressions. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Shakur, Assata. [1987] Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
X, Malcolm. [1965] Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.
————-. [1970]. By Any Means Necessary. Pathfinder Press, 1992.
————-. [1992]. February 1965: The Final Speeches. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2010.
michelle alexander is not the enemy; hiding behind a malcolm quote will not make it so.
there is nothing sadder than a brilliant mind intent on cutting another down to size (earning plaudits in the process) rather than simply seeking to expand the analysis to include important structural questions.
Greg Thomas offers a brilliant critique here. The critique of course is about structures and a critique of the (liberal, bourgeois) framework in which Alexander bases her structural analyses.
Why is it that we have the moral obligation to expand the analysis based on a framework that presupposes the principles of liberalism and the de-radicalization of our progenitors?
@Jonathan/everybody,
“…. to expand the analysis based on a framework that presupposes the principles of liberalism and the de-radicalization of our progenitors?”
Jonathan you hit the nail right on the head and I mean dead center.
Herein lies the essence of Dr. Thomas’s critique and subsequent (maybe unintentional)solution many respondens were seeking via explicit declaration but didn’t receive.
Critical Africana theorists posited the question “from who’s psycho-cultural analytical paradigm do we operate from”?
Liberalism, a eurocentric socio-political construct, as Malcolm eloquently deconstructed has historically been and will continue to be a sheep in wolfs clothing to Black people (e.g. Manning Marable’s re-conceptualization/de-radicalization of Malcolm and subsequently his ideas to the 21st century benefit of white folks comes too mind).
If Michelle Alexander’s entire analysis is presumptively (and given the evidence Greg Thomas lays out for us, maybe not so presumptive after all) grounded on such an insidious construct how then can her solutions be truly liberatory for the victims of white domination? She doesn’t merely re-introduce a politcally polarizing issue via this book but offers solutions to the problem which she refuses to call out. WHITE DOMINATION!
Fundamentally, in retrospect, as Dr. Thomas deftly highlights she doesn’t comprehensively challenge white folks probably for fear of being ostracized from the comforts of a bourgeoisie lifestyle. The tricky part of it all is she, like many other liberals, may not be consciously aware of it(those of us who are aware of this contradiction suffer from it).
It doesn’t entirely negate her scholarship and advocacy or all liberals for that matter. The masters tools can be sharpened and used against them but it should be correctly perceived and utilized as just that, the masters tools not the strategy/salvo. Particularly at the expense of correctly grounded analysis and solutions we should be utilizing (i.e. Black Radicalism, Pan-Afrikanism, George Jacksonian theory which isn’t free from constructive criticism either, etc…).
If her work or any other liberal is unwittingly of use to us then good but we must diligently remain mindful who’s camp their operating out of.
Hotep
To me, the book is a clarion call to fight a tangible piece of the racist puzzle: ending the failed (except to the profiteers but in terms of the availability of drugs), bloody, and racist drug war. Will ending the drug war end racism? Will it end the horrors of imperialism or capitalism? Quite unlikely–but it is a battle that can be engaged and won and serve as a stepping-stone toward those more laudable goals. I believe that for audiences blind to the issues and critiques adroitly raised here, Alexander’s book does a fine job of laying out the rationale to bring that fight. Lest we forget, we have Eric Holder and Barack Obama doing FAR worse things in regard to sustaining that bloody, racist war.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
All published writers or public persons should be subject to public criticism. It does not mean that you are discrediting the person, quite the opposite. There is always room for improvement that also includes President Obama and Mrs.Alexander. How can we make for a better society if we don’t point out what’s really wrong? Our young generation will count on us to do the right thing. When your child does poor work at school, do you ignore his grades or do you encourage them to do better? If so does that means your’e trying to bring him or her down? I hope not. So let’s not make this critic personal. There are some valid points being made on some of the topics covered in the book. Also a loot of issues were just eliminated to avoid making her audience angry,because white folk really do not like talking about the race problem in America. When we say:”we live in a colorblind society,” we are vindicating white folks of the hell we still face going through this journey in life faced with white supremacy. I’m not blaming white people for everything,just for the thing that they are responsible for.
I feel it is an opinion. It is important for any work to be critiqued. I was required to write a critical analysis for a class of this book. After reading it, I was at a loss. How was I going to critique this book, she hit every point on the nail? Then I did more research of my own and realized she missed a lot of real information. There are many other factors and it is more about money than it is about race.
For Greg Thomas:
“You doth protest to much” or try to wrap this around your mind..’Brevity is the sole of wit’
I am not one who ever censors anything in the universe so as a part of my personhood and cultural dna I affirm your right to any perspective on this book as well as your top flight scholarship in your critique.
Yet where does it take us? What’s next? What is gained by your exhaustive examination?
I reason that what is more significant is the orginal and authentic work Alexander’s book than your analysis of her book.
I reason that the title alone despite it’s short length as as transformative, insiteful, informative and influences thinking than most books which explore crime and social justice.
I reason that genius theme phrases like ” I am somebody” “Black is Beautiful” ‘Keep Hope Alive” and even “Nigger Please” ‘The New Jim Crow’ bring much value and utility to the marketplace..
In summary I enjoyed your analysis but I valued her book more the market and the readership it has reached and impacted..Just sayin..
Peace
Thrasher
Great and valuable critique – I agree with much of it, but I wouldn’t be as quick assert as Dr. Thomas does about what Ms. Alexander know or doesn’t know. Letters and scholarship does not exclude any of us from having to wear masks in this ‘internal colony’. Plus, she did warn, “this book is not for everyone.” Some of us can only do what we can manage being accountable for – so do whatcha can! Again, valuable critique. Only at Vox Union can I find critique of the high and mighty, bright and popular among us – keep bringing it!
I think the critique fills holes in a book that is supposed to a “101″ for the masses on how mass incarceration is seeping the collective efficacy of Black communities in this democratic facist empire. For me, I don’t think people like Michelle Alexander should get a free pass just because she has managed to get a message to transcend to a white liberal audience. I think we need to ask how she did this and at what cost? The analysis brought here fills those gaps. I feel like in our social change work Black people always have to set up this apologetic posturing to make white liberals and other “people of color” who promote self destructive liberal behavior comfortable.The book and when I have heard Michelle speak sets up this white accomodationalist posturing that upholds white supremacy culture. This allows for them to excuse themselves and run away from being held accountable in ways that would be transformative and not reinforce the same punitive measures the system prescribes on to Black people. The book also doesn’t interrogate this pathology around criminalization that happens in Black communities where then they system thinks Black people are crazy for thinking that the system is out to get them.
Mr. Thomas, I’d be very interested in reading your book on the subject. If Ms. Alexander’s take on Black incarceration is flawed, perhaps you should write a more in-depth critical analysis of the subject.
Yes Mr. Thomas I am also looking forward to see your book. It was obvious that Ms. Alexander was writing for white liberals, what is wrong with that. Ms. Alexander never claimed she is some body more than that. I was reading your long review waiting for you to teach some thing important and not obvious.
you really waist-ed your time and mine. I did not know your name now I know.
By the way this not for you, because you wont change. this is for readers.
one more thing Glen Ford addressed her book respectfully, If you are down to earth ask Glen why he did do that.
every thing you said was correct, but it was waist of time.
This is an important contribution to our discussion and organizing around the prison industrial complex, capitalism and white supremacy.
Professor,
This is what we used to call “intellectual masturbation” back in the day. It serves no purpose other than to demonstrate one’s “scholarship.”
The sister, Michelle Alexander, has not only written an eye-opening and pull-the-covers-off revelation of our current situation as Black people. She has also ignited a whole new movement to get our brothers and sisters out of jail, and stop us from going there in the first place. Do you realize that a whole generation of Black men are now imprisoned? Do you understand what this means for the next generation?
Yeah, she’s weak on some points that you cheerfully point out. But, time is over and too tough now for simple theoretical differences to divert us from our 500 year old mission: Freedom.
I’m going to deal with your piece; that, is I am going to review your review in more detail later.
Peace.
HD
Herbert, please do not review his so called review. I might label you as ” Intellectual mas….tor.”
This is a very valuable critique, however what we have to understand is no objective book has ever been written on social issues. Alexander herself professes that she had a, “negro mentality” (my words) about the prison industrial complex. So like any book written an element of personality and tendency is in the book. Greg’s critique is a good one but much like all books on sociology and historical developments, without a solution were merely wasting our time in unfruitful bouts of intellectual masturbation. We’ve come to a point were it is conclusive fact that understanding the problem is not sufficient to move us. Scholarship just compounds this phenomenon of information consumption without concrete examples that captures the minds of our people in mass to action. I could be very wrong someone out there might write the one or series of books that sparks mass consciousness and action through awareness. I personally find it unlikely because of the retardedly slow process and progress that is made off of such works. Personally I get the feeling that a lot of these books are merely consumed solely to appear to be well-read in a coffee shop or classroom discussion. A major factor that we need to comprehend is that until we can have these types of discussions on books or any form of propaganda in general, we need absolute control over our media and our cultural expression. Only when we do these things can we give these ideas a chance of taking root in the minds of many instead of just adding to the value of a few. The media as it stands is not going to help you get free and will not help you organize its White Power into Peoples Power or more importantly to us Black Power. The root of many problems starts with the fact that we do not control our own communities or have any major advocate groups that don’t get their money from the government or non-white people. We can’t get New or Old Jim Crowed in an organized community. If many people jump that mental hurdle of acting scary towards their own community you’ll be surprised at how fast we end a lot of these schemes on black life.Unity in mass is the only solution. No permitted protest cry-out of 30 or 40 people will change anything.
I think both her book and your critique have ther places. I may disagree with some of the thoughts left by your readers here-they appear to be a bit contradictory, in and of themselves- but I allow for there freedom to express their thoughts. I have read parts of the book and see some of the things you have shared. if nothing else you have actually made given folks like myself and reason to look evenmore intrincally at her work which from what I have read is necessary.
We can have both a book about an important issue as well as a crituque of it coexisitng. Michelle Alexander brings new interest to an issue that has been present for many years. The critique by the professor does what a scholar is supposed to do: to estimate the utility of the piece. The book is written for a specific demographic and funded by a partiularly “interesting” source. The issues can always be seen from different perspectives. We can utilize the information and try to identify the spin inherent. Most important question is whether any form of media empowers or disempowers us. Anything that gets popular support and places the responsibility for change on those outside of us means that we need to study Garvey and earlier attempts at having others to assist our progress. The bibliographical citations and insights from the critique are far from masturbation. Soros like all rich whites have a clear agenda for that which they support.
I’d like to thank Greg Thomas for this critique, even though I disagree with what seems to be the premise: that anything discussed in “mainstream” circles on “mainstream” terms is useless.
However, I think it it still important that we have de-colonized thinkers like Brother Thomas, because he forces us to define what we REALLY mean by liberation. He is an important thinker and although I gritted my teeth on this one, I’m glad I read it!
This “review” insults the intelligence of anyone who has actually read the book. It astounds me that Jared Ball, whose radio show and perspective I ordinarily respect, would post this garbage. What is clear is that most people posting and commenting about the book have NOT actually read it. Jared, I heard an excellent interview that you did with Michelle Alexander and her sister on your show, and so I’m surprised that you would turn around and post something like this. Serious thoughtful critiques are perfectly appropriate, but this so-called review doesn’t pass the laugh test. I would ignore it as simply more evidence (as if more was needed) that too many black intellectuals would rather tear each other up in a crabs-in-the-barrel race to the bottom than actually get serious about building a radical movement, but because so many people seem to be taking this review seriously, I will make a few obvious points:
1- First, read the book! Do not believe what anyone tells you about the book until you have actually read it cover-to-cover. It is too easy for people — pursuing their own ego-driven or political agendas — to offer up gross caricatures or simplifications and pass it off as serious critique. The growing popularity of the book actually offers us the opportunity to have a critically important dialogue in a wide range of communities, but we can’t have that dialogue if we simply read posts on Facebook or inane reviews like this one and act like we know what we’re talking about.
2. The author of this “critique” seems incensed by the fact that Michelle Alexander is married to a prosecutor, and offers this as evidence that she is nothing but a liberal. This is ridiculous. In her book, as well as in numerous interviews, Alexander has acknowledged that more than a decade ago she WAS a black, liberal/progressive, civil rights lawyer, but that she had a series of experiences that opened her eyes to a racial reality that is dismissed by most people as radical, paranoid, conspiratorial or crazy. Her entire book is devoted to showing (with overwhelming evidence) why she now believes the radicals were right, and why she is now a radical — not a liberal — on race issues. She argues that traditional liberal views and approaches to racial justice (and the phenomenon of mass incarceration ) are not only wrong — but serve as the foundation for the entire racial caste system that has been reborn in the U.S. The entire book is a critique of liberalism — a steady dismantling of the liberal justifications that have been offered for mass incarceration. Apparently the author of this critique thinks it’s not enough for Alexander to demolish all the liberal justifications, she must also divorce her husband!
3. The author also claims to be furious that Alexander did not spend time discussing the black power movement and did not cite more radical black authors. He faults Alexander for mentioning organizations like the ACLU and NAACP, and for mentioning Obama. In a truly bizarre twist, he claims to believe that the subtitle is meant literally — as if Alexander actually argues that we’re living in a colorblind world! She is arguing precisely the opposite, which is what anyone who has actually read the book knows. And every reference in the book to the NAACP, the ACLU or Obama is to criticize them and their approach to racial justice and mass incarceration.
The basic problem with this review is that it is tearing up a book that Alexander has not written. Her book is NOT about racial justice movements or resistance struggles at all. She spends less than 3 pages discussing the role of the civil rights movement in bringing down Jim Crow, and every time she mentions any mainstream civil rights organization (or Obama) it is to criticize them, not congratulate them. Obviously, it would be great for someone to write a book about past and present movements to challenge racial injustice or criminal injustice — and the relationship of those movements to the emerging movement to end mass incarceration. In such a book it would be inexcusable not to talk in depth about Malcolm X or Assata and the rest. But that’s not what this book is about — not even remotely. I recognize that some people play politics with footnotes, dropping cites to particular people or authors to make political points, but the citations and footnotes in the book are simply for the purpose of showing people where the stunning data and facts can be found. The fact that Mumia and Angela Davis have offered praise and support for the book (people the author thinks should have been credited) shows how far off base this critique actually is.
Alexander ends her book by saying that it is highly unlikely that civil rights groups will build or lead this movement, and that it will be people who have been locked up and locked out who will raise their voice, flex their power. She says the rage will frighten some, but clearly she is not among those who may be concerned — she’s openly wishing for a bottom-up movement led by prisoners and people who know all too well the brutality of this system.
Again, I hope people do not get duped by this review and start passing it around, eager to do some liberal bashing. This review is precisely the kind of ugly, nasty, ego-driven stuff that can destroy movements. Don’t feed the beast.
Brother Jackson,
Well done! You’ve saved me the trouble of pointing out that this professor is simply picking at nits. Dozens and dozens of reviews have been done of Alexander’s work (some complementary and others not so much). There’s nothing wrong with intellectually honest criticism….In the end it deepens our commitment and at once sharpens and focuses our approach to what appear at first to be intractable problems and issues. This “review” does neither. “Crabs in a barrell”? Bull’s eye!
So, thanks again. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Peace & Power,
HD
The fact this book has blasted into the mainstream and has been praised by so many white liberals, some more wary people might be cautious about its intent. The book at the very least has put the conversation on the table for people who never intended to sit at it. If this book sparks a wave of people doing more than talking about mass incarceration then it shouldn’t be subject to harsh criticism (real or imagined). As much as Greg Thomas has said about the book I think he could write his own book that gives more life and detail to his own interpretations. What movement is being killed by someone having an opinion? A book club? A conference? Mass incarceration is not new and the book itself should be sound enough to withstand criticism. If the critique is off base then people will see that when they read the book, the same way Manning Marable’s book got jocked to people who disagree with his premise and scholarship.
Thank you. In the end Professor Alexander has most importantly written a book that is being read, covering a critical topic that has been ignored by many, and misunderstood by most. When was the last time any book, covering any important issue for black Americans, has sparked so much interest in movement building and positive change?
I forgot to mention how CRAZY it is to say that the book is addressed to white liberals or that Michelle Alexander has been speaking mainly to white liberals. I was curious about her when the book first came out, so I’ve been following her progress over the past two years. Yes, the book came out two years ago. It just recently became a bestseller. Alexander has been speaking in prisons, re-entry centers, as well as dozens of black churches. The network of black churches founded by Rev. Jeremiah Wright – the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference – created a study guide for black churches a year ago, long before the book took off. Yes, she speaks at predominately white universities too, but this idea that the mainstream media has embraced her is insane. The mainstream media wouldn’t touch the book with a ten-foot pole for nearly a year and, as far as I know, she still has never been on CNN — despite the Trayvon Martin scandal etc. It was a grassroots movement led initially by the Black Star Project in Chicago that put the book on the map. It was word of mouth in BLACK communities that created the buzz, but now we have a “black radical intellectual” tearing it down on the ground that she’s speaking to white liberals when that was never her primary audience, and the folks who have been working hard to force the book into the mainstream have been black folks working at the grassroots level.
Of course the book is not perfect and doesn’t cover everything — no book is perfect. But this “review” is nothing more than haterism and it should be rejected by anyone and everyone who is serious about moving beyond talk and actually building a movement.
I have only apologized to Leslie and Michelle Alexander for not offering a heads up that we were posting this review. I did owe them that and have offered to make room for a response should one come. But the idea that Greg’s critique is not worthy of a hearing, especially here, is simply absurd. I do not apologize for giving space to his views or a political perspective with which I fully agree. I am also deeply concerned that the views Greg offers are so quickly dismissed as heresy when they represent the politics of this website in particular. Michelle’s book has been welcomed into nearly all mainstream media spaces whereas the kinds of views represented by Greg and VOXUNION are routinely demonized and omitted. Well, not here. So to the extent that readers of our website cannot tolerate this kind of exchange they are invited to choose an unlimited number of other more liberal or comfy online locations. We gave Michelle and Leslie their time last year as we thought then was appropriate and have now given Greg his. Challenge and or critique him as you like but never think that this is somehow out of step w our principles. Feel free also to review the recent show where we invited two of my own critics on to get at me, posted their work, gave them space in these pages and kept it moving. We have also called others like Peniel Joseph to the carpet and got at them too. Since when is debate a sin? Since when are we here to deny space to sound and radical criticism? To dismiss Greg as some here have done is to me a gross error but welcomed nonetheless just as is his critique of Michelle. And I cant help but laugh at posts coming from a “George Jackson” condemning one who deploys the actual analysis of the real GJ, The Dragon!
IMO this article makes some important points- but IMO Mrs Alexander’s Book has had the impact of at-least making the discussion of the US’ Criminalized {in}Justice System / Prison Industrial Complex part of so-called ‘main-stream’ discourse- which many even in the Black mis-leadership class avoid [IE: Obama & Holder going MIA / AWOL on Troy Davis' legalized 'Lynching'].
We must keep in mind that Ms Alexander began as a so-called ‘liberal do-gooder’ who was interacting w {ex}prisoners in ‘Eyes Wide-Shut’ mode until one of those brothers said something that jolted her into consciousness- forcing her to take a ‘real’ look at the impacts of the US’ Criminalized {in}Justice System / Prison Industrial Complex & then write her book on the subject. Of course she’s not [yet anyway] ready to go all the way hard- like Prof Greg Thomas, given her back-ground, but lets wait & see how things continue to unfold w her.
FYI: 2 Recent important articles RE: the US’ Criminalized {in}Justice System / Prison Industrial Complex: BAR’s Glen Ford’s Piece: ‘Private Prison Corporations Are Slave Traders’ [@ http://blackagendareport.com/content/private-prison-corporations-are-slave-traders ] -AND- ‘Locking Down an American Workforce in the Prison-Corporate Complex’ by Steve Fraser & Josh Freeman [@ http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/19-4 ] Which is one of the best pieces I’ve seen on the historic link between the slavery, the prison industry’, chain-gang & prison labor to attack & under-cut workers’ unions / collective bargaining rights for better wages, benefits, working conditions, etc. – Yet since the era of ‘Tricky Dick’, the Nixon / Reagan Repugs rode that ‘War on Drugs / Getting Tough on Crime’ [code for getting tougher on & upping the on-going war on Blacks] Gravy Train into the White-House for 5 Presidencies [not that those corp Dims Ole Slick Willie & Obama / Holder are that much better]. They [in the service of the corp / power elites] seemingly knew / know that playing the 'Racism-Card' & scape-goating Blacks & Browns has a proven track-record of getting so many white working-class folks to continuously vote & act against what is ultimately in their own best interest.
I think a lot of the comments saying how we should not critique Dr. Michelle Alexander is analogous to those saying that we cannot criticise Obama, especially Mr. Herbert Dyer, Jr.’s piece. For instance, I do not believe that Alexander began anew or even restarted any anti-prison movement, by a longshot, but even if she did, how would that make her above reproach? Also, the comments that is similar to “I’d be very interested in reading your book on the subject,” is just like the ridiculous retort that “If you don’t like who’s running for president, then run for it yourself.” Outrageous.
I do not have much to say about the Dr. Greg Thomas’ work itself except that I agree with its premises and that any discussion about the prison industrial complex that does not include George Jackson and a review of the Black Power movement is simply incomplete, regardless of audience. I have only skimmed over the New Jim Crow just to say that I have read it a bit because it is so popular, but it just wasn’t interesting to me. However, I disagree with the idea that books have to present new information or else it is simply ‘unoriginal’ and unnecessary. Indeed, if we were to take that logic to its conclusion(which I am truly starting to subscribe to), then all scholarship is nothing be reheated microwaveable dinners and why be bothered with them at all when we can have a healthy organic meal (primary sources such as Blood in My Eye by George Jackson). I could rant about the state of scholarship all day, but my point is that no matter how revolutionary versus mainstream one particular scholar is, they both are in the same basket in terms of helpfulness to the masses.
Peace
Jared,
I am gald you stepped up and offer an apology not for Thomas effort but your ambush of Alexander . I have respect for this site and you have cemented it with your apology .
The first time I heard of her fame, I wondered why so many mainstream figures bigged her up. I haven’t read the book and don’t plan to. Maybe that makes me a hater, but I’d rather to read a solution written by these child soldiers we have lost in DC. Their writings are much more powerful and solution-oriented to me.
Well, I have read ‘The New Jim Crow’ and all I can say is one thing: This is all 100% true and is some of the most beautiful analysis you are going to read on the book. The difference is that one is from the viewpoint of someone who wants to save the oppressive system (Alexander) and one who wants to destroy the oppressive system (Thomas). I enjoyed her book for what it was, but in all honesty, to combat everything she details in the book, we have seen where the path of ‘civil rights movements’ have led over the past forty years by working within the system where Alexander, her husband, family and privilege resides. Therefore, it is revolution or nothing. That is for me or anyone else. Period. Once again, beautiful analysis!
I hesitate to jump into this discussion but something seems to be amiss here. I have lived through the period of the black power movement, have spent considerable time in prison, and have watched the prison population explode exponentially while nothing was done. The civil rights advocates declared victory for their struggle, after the passage of the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 and went off to reap the benefits of affirmative action. The black power movement succumbed to the onslaught of COINTELPRO and internal conflict. For the next 40 years all the black power movement had for “mass Incarceration” was Free All Political Prisoners (an infinitismal number of prisoners) in the context of the present prison population of 2.4 million. They have freed no one. “Political Prisoners” have grown old, gotten sick, and are dying. The only other movement they have produced in the last 40 years has been “a bowel movement”. Our communities have been turned into open air prisons, our schools have been turned into pipelines to prison, our streets and communities have been turned into Bantustans. We live in an apartheid nation.
Along comes Michelle Alexander who writes a book called the New Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her publishers published 3,000 books, the book has now sold over 200,000. It was a book who’s time had come. What she wrote about was not new, I myself had done some of the same research in 1993 while serving time in prison and wrote a paper that could have served as an outline for her book (my background is from the streets of Harlem, lumpenproletariat). My research, and the research of others, saw the exploding prison population and were aware of the fact that 1 in 3 black men were under the control of the criminal justice system. My research revealed that our communities were being politically weakened by the imprisonment and disenfranchisement of its members and I filed a class action lawsuit to try to remedy this. There was no radical support for any kind of movement to combat this “push back” against the gains of the civil rights and black power movements. Civil rights organizations were fighting to get Confederate flags off of government buildings and the “Black Power Movement” was demanding the release of political prisoners and providing them with commissary money while they grew old and died. My class action lawsuit sparked some movement building from 2000-2006, former prisoners were building grassroots organizations in states around the country, educating and organizing former prisoners and community members to register to vote, to use their political voice. That was aborted by the civil rights organizations that controlled the funding for the movement, i.e., the Brennan Center, the ACLU, and the Sentencing Project kicked the movement building to the curb and gave the money to lobbyist and their law firms to pursue a legislative initiative.
Michelle Alexander pulled all of the research that was out there together and wrote what I think was a brilliant and inspiring book: she connected the dots, gave the “push back” to the civil rights struggle a name, i.e., The New Jim crow, and created an awareness of one of the biggest human rights issues on the planet— 5% of the world’s population with 25% of the world’s prisoners, the majority of which were people of color. She laid out the track to this mass incarceration so that anyone could see it, the numbers made her revelations indisputable. Now here you comes the Black Power Movement with the “paralysis of analysis”, not how do we use this moment to build a sustainable movement that will dismantle this system of mass incarceration. The struggle between the greedy and the needy seems perpetual, there is no permanent solution. There will always be push and push back. They pushed back and now we must do the same. In all of this critique I have heard not one word about the movement that her critics think we need, a vision for that movement, or any efforts to bring it about. We are in a Kairos moment, the window of opportunity for change is open, the economy is busted and this engine of burn, rape, loot and pillage is staggering and being brought into question on every front. What do we do? Oh, we sit around and critique the author of a book that has done more to awaken and inspire than anything her critics have written or contributed to the struggle for abolition of the prison industrial complex and the building of caring communities. Let the record reflect that I stand in complete support of Michelle Alexander and her work at waking up our people that have walked through the poppy fields and fell asleep.
My sentiments entirely. We’ve got work to do, certainly we can agree on that!
i tend to agree with the last comment by ‘jazz’. the topics in that book are widely promoted yet people have been discussing that for a really long time (one could kick in angela davis, who wrote on prison abolition awhile back, grew up in birmingham alabama and was at the sorbonne in france when she heard her sister’s best friend had been blown up at the neighborhood church in alabama when she was studying in france—she later went to germany and studied with adorno (something about how pop culture/capitalism destroyed the revolution—-eg ‘survival of the fittest’ (mobb deep) tho i prefer backyard band version). then it was going back to cali, busted since someone was carrying her books when trying to get people out of jail, now at uc santa cruz. lecture circuit.
i saw cornel west twice—at some church in dc (near mx park or also for clifton terrace—now gentrified in part but notorious) and then getting arrested at the supreme court as part of occupy.
‘acceptable black’ is one term. you got the creds, can talk standard english, throw in some references, and good to go.
While I appreciate the radical revolutionary perspective George Thomas presents here in voxunion.com, and I sympathize with the anti-capitalist perspective his position contains, I find the analysis a bit useless. At some point critical review of works like Michelle Alexander’s, i.e. works that support social change, must go beyond the obvious, which in this case is that the book is not anticapitalist. So what? To be useful, Thomas needs to make a radical case that provides a more convincing alternative, rather than falling back on the antique dead sea scrolls of the Black Power radicals as if they were canonical gospel. A more useful contemporary anticapitalist critique of Alexander’s book would challenge and examine the origins and utility of “the myth of colorblindness.”
Such a critique would go beyond her open acknowledgements of having been a beneficiary of affirmative action recruited into the service of capitalist oppression. How did this happen to her? To Obama? How does it continue to this day manifested in the presence of Black police, prison guards, prosecutors, judges and politicians, and even more dangerously, Black soldiers? Is this a “New Trustee” system in which some Blacks are recruited to be overseers with carefully disguised bribes in a system that presents taking such bribes as the only escape from even worse oppression and exploitation in the ghetto? Then add in the roles of the music and sports industries, which provide diversionary spectacle alongside manipulation of images of celebrity and wealth to create a propaganda machine marketing a persuasive and hegemonic cultural worldview offering either submission to the capitalist system or becoming aggressively marginalized by embracing the image of the dark-skinned, foul mouthed, violent, misogynistic “Public Enemy” anti-hero adorned with bling. This is the picture for today, not the picture of forty years ago when George Jackson was writing. Things have changed. Analysis must adapt as well.
Are real Black Power revolutionaries ready to accept that violence failed? The fantasy that Malcolm’s not so subtle threat that using violent “any means necessary” can work to gain the political power that Mao erroneously claimed comes only from the barrel of a gun, needs re-examination. The genuine radicalism of the BPP was manifested in its community-based services, its free meals and education programs not its fascination with firearms. Those were the activities and programs whose presence outside the capitalist system gave it the potential to overcome capitalist oppression.
Dave Britton
It is frustrating to me that we are faced with the humanitarian challenge of our lives, but we want to argue theoretical perspectives. What ever baseline Professor Alexander starts from, the evidence she presents demand action!
A lot of things demand action. The problem is when these issues arrive if you base your historical and political analysis in the hull of a leaky boat, your likely to drown. Going off of emotion can even make you a useful tool in someone elses plan. If you want an example look at that joke video circling the internet called Kony 2012. Kony 2012 basically uses the same emotion driven activism to mobilize the ignorant into a western military looting adventure with Africom. If this book can get people out of their apathy and do some good that’s great, but this book isn’t above scrutiny just because so many people attach themselves to it. As far as things demanding action mass incarceration is a softball game if your one of the 6mil + plus people who’ve been butchered in Congo over their own land and resources. The 2mil + people locked up in the prison industrial complex demand action just as much as any other issue of oppression on our backs. These two important issues need action but also need to not fall victim to the comfortable tethers of the easy solution or the even weaker reform. To make a sound solution possible we need action but we also need to be able to at least have a discussion about where were going and what is required of all aspects of our struggle.
The reason you may find the argument useless is the same reason others might find it useful… It is after all a critique which is an opinion on the presented work. Also on the more scurrilous assertions you make about two statements made by Malcolm and Mao seems to further color your opinion and preference. Malcolm said, “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” which is him merely saying that African people would defend there right to exist whatever that might require. How Malcolm’s statement could be considered a threat is beyond me and to whom would feel threatened?… It’s not as if he said kill everyone else who’s not like me. The only person that should feel threatened by that is the person who would make that existence impossible. On the Mao quote being erroneous I have to try not to laugh at this one. Mao said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” what about this do you find erroneous besides your sense of current and recent world history?… Also what empire or nation do you know of that established itself and maintains its power or influence without making that statement true?… The problem with these cherry-picked statements is that some of us unfortunately have to live in the world, and not in a dream of how we would like things to be.
I’ll limit my comment to one area of concern. While I appreciate the need to underline the continuity between the various forms that white supremacy in the United States has taken over the centuries, I think it does a disservice to our understanding to collapse distinct mechanisms of social control under one undifferentiated label — as it appears Mr. Thomas does.
As society evolves, so do the methods of oppression and effective resistance. Resistance under the sharecropping system looks different than it does in a factory. Understanding the methods of racist domination is part of putting together an effective resistance.
King’s failure in Chicago makes this point clearly. The strategies employed in Alabama did not work in big northern cities — this limitation was part of the reason for the emergence of the Black Power movement.
Michele Alexander’s argument that anti-racists need to understand the role of mass incarceration in a contemporary understanding of Black oppression is one of her key insights. It equips activists with effective tools for taking on white supremacy — further it correctly elevates the struggle of prisoners & ex-prisoners to the level of historic importance and dignity it deserves in the current fight for liberation.
On this point, I do not think Thomas’s critique is more insightful than Michele Alexander’s. In fact, his critique takes us backwards.
Mike Stark
Can you elaborate these points more,”Michele Alexander’s argument that anti-racists need to understand the role of mass incarceration in a contemporary understanding of Black oppression is one of her key insights. It equips activists with effective tools for taking on white supremacy — further it correctly elevates the struggle of prisoners & ex-prisoners to the level of historic importance and dignity it deserves in the current fight for liberation.
On this point, I do not think Thomas’s critique is more insightful than Michele Alexander’s. In fact, his critique takes us backwards.”.
Also can you define what an anti-racists is? How do they function in this issue of power dynamics?
I have not read the book, acknowledged key points, enjoyed the the esponses and will finsih by saying Mr thomas you are on point but a the late Charysse MacCintyre wrote a seminal book called teh criminalization of race> basicaly postbellum Amerikkka the thought of free blacks exacerbated white racial pathology and have used prisons and penal systems as mode of control, fear and oppresssion. So in some sense Ms Alexander was reinventing the wheel so in that sense I agreed with Thomas’s laser critique but do agree that her book should be used as part and parcel of the body of works to add to our very NECESSARY NEED FOR MASS ORGANIZATION and state violence…….peace in times of war!
‘David’ sounds suspiciously like a professor I used to have.
To the idea of ‘old’ vs ‘new’ racism: Racism is dynamic in that the systems by which it is employed change over time yet the objective remains the same. Michelle Alexander is both right and wrong. Like my professor said “People assume that time (in terms of years, decades etc.) = progress yet the historical record shows signifcant setbacks for American Blacks (reconstruction under Johnson, the decades of the 1930s, 1980s, and for that matter from 2000 on). Alexander’s book may not be perfect, what is? While we argue its merits on this blog the problem grows and is ignored in virtually every media outlet. While Obama and Romney debate this 47% bullshit or the differences in their foreign policies (there are none) REAL issues such as this get little attention. I have conservative friends that LOVE to regale me with their knowledge of the reasons for the ‘black situation’ gleaned mainly from Thomas Sowell. If one or two of these well-meaning people read Alexander’s book maybe some opinions would change and then real change could occur or at least be discussed.
I realize my post isn’t nearly as detailed or well written/argued as all of yours, please forgive me for rambling.
Shout out to my suspected Prof though!
Greg’s analysis, it seems, was prescient for some. Many more radical thinkers and activists are critiquing Ms. Alexander’s analysis. For a brief, well thought out piece on the subject, go to People of Color Organize and read the piece, “The New Jim Crow Discredited”. It also provides links to Mr. Thomas’s article as well as articles written Joseph Osel of Seattle University. I think those of you who criticize Mr. Thomas should read Mr. Osel’s 2 articles and then perhaps see where you stand on the subject.