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Michelle AlexanderA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In the final chapter Alexander looks to the future of civil rights activism in the era of mass incarceration. She is disheartened by the fact that major protest and activist movements are rarely mobilized except in response to overt racism. She points to the outpouring of support for the Jena 6, a group of Black teenagers in Louisiana charged with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight instigated by a white classmate hanging nooses in a tree. Alexander suggests that if there was no explicitly racist imagery like nooses associated with the case, it would not have attracted as much attention. She then questions where the protesters and civil rights leaders were for the countless other children tried as adults for minor drug crimes.
While Alexander considers the silence and denial over the racial component of mass incarceration forgivable though inexcusable in everyday Americans, she is puzzled by the silence of civil rights activists. She suggests that modern advocacy may be ill-suited to addressing mass incarceration because, in the years following the Brown decision and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, a widespread perception emerged that civil rights lawyers were the most important agents of reform, as they brought the fight out of the streets and into the courtroom. This complicates efforts to combat mass incarceration, however, because civil rights lawyers are often hesitant to work on behalf of guilty clients, even if all they are guilty of is possessing a small amount of marijuana. Instead, civil rights lawyers tend to seek out model plaintiffs like Rosa Parks. Indeed, Alexander points out that Parks was not the first woman in Montgomery to refuse to move to the back of the bus. But civil rights advocates rejected two other potential plaintiffs because one was pregnant by an older man, and the other’s father was thought to be an alcoholic.
Given the enormity of tackling criminal justice reform and the difficulty of finding “model” plaintiffs, many civil rights activists are content to focus on initiatives like affirmative action and educational inequities. Yet Alexander maintains that unless the racial caste system of mass incarceration is dismantled, individual success stories on other civil rights fronts will fail to lift the fortunes of Black communities in general.
Alexander next reckons with precisely what it would mean to return incarceration rates to pre-1970 levels. Prisons would have to release four out of every five incarcerated individuals, causing widespread prison closures and lost jobs for hundreds of thousands of unionized workers.
For that reason, the primary vector of reform for Alexander is not to undertake prison reform alone but to attack the problem at its source: by ending the War on Drugs. She proposes that all financial incentives to police departments surrounding drug arrests should be revoked. That includes federal grant money, current drug forfeiture laws, and the transfer of equipment from the US military. Furthermore, new laws must bring an end to racial profiling and other police tactics that have eviscerated the Fourth Amendment. Better data collection must be required, mandatory minimum sentences must be eliminated, and marijuana and possibly other drugs should be legalized. Drug abuse in general should be treated as a public health problem rather than a crime problem. Finally, laws and regulations that discriminate against the formerly incarcerated must be rescinded.
Speaking from a more holistic standpoint, Alexander adds that whatever movement emerges to reform the criminal justice system must not be “colorblind.” Her fear is that reform movements will be based around race-neutral arguments, like that the system isn’t effective at combating violent crime—which it isn’t—or that in an era of financial austerity, other approaches would be much cheaper—which is also true. The truth of these arguments aside, however, any reforms that fail to reckon honestly with the fact that mass incarceration is a system of racial control will not be enough to prevent another racial undercaste from replacing it, just as it did at the end of slavery, and just as it did at the end of Jim Crow.
Finally, Alexander argues that a new civil rights consensus must be reached that benefits all Americans outside the wealthy elite, white and Black alike. First, however, whites must fully relinquish the myth of psychological superiority they receive by virtue of existing outside the racial undercaste. This is the racial bribe they receive as being passive observers of the system of mass incarceration. Alexander also argues that a very small number of Black individuals have received their own racial bribe in the form of affirmative action. She is highly ambivalent about affirmative action, arguing that by helping to elevate a small number of exceptional Black men and women to vaunted elite positions like diplomats, cabinet members, and even president of the United States, affirmative action allows the myth of colorblindness to persist. After all, if some people of color can rise to the top of American society, it suggests that incarcerated individuals’ inability to do so is a personal moral failure rather than a societal failure. Finally, Alexander recommends a return to Martin Luther King’s proposed Poor People’s Movement and an end to all racial bribes that perpetuate systems of gross injustice like mass incarceration.
Through the example of the Jena 6, Alexander reiterates the theme that, in the era of colorblindness, only the most egregious examples of racism manage to mobilize Americans on behalf of people of color. The Jena 6 example specifically highlights America’s persistent sensitivity to the imagery of the country’s racist past, like nooses. Perhaps this is because it gives Americans the sense that the country has progressed. Yet by labeling something racist only when it exists inside the circle Americans have drawn around clearly objectionable relics of the past, the structural racism that supports mass incarceration will remain invisible.
More than in any other chapter, Alexander addresses her colleagues in civil rights law directly and candidly. As stated earlier, she believes that the courthouse doors have effectively closed on challenges to mass incarceration, and therefore the transformation of this system will likely come through the mobilization of grassroots movements like the ones that emerged following the publication of The New Jim Crow. For Alexander’s part, she no longer works in civil rights litigation. She explains her reasons for leaving the profession in an interview with The New Yorker:
After spending many years working as a civil-rights lawyer and then as a legal, academic, and policy advocate, I became frustrated with the very narrow scope of acceptable discourse in those spaces. As I see it, the crisis of mass incarceration is not simply a legal or political problem to be solved, but it’s a profound spiritual and moral crisis, as well. (Remnick, David. “Ten Years After ‘The New Jim Crow.’” The New Yorker. 17 Jan. 2020.)
Given the extent to which Alexander views mass incarceration in metaphysical terms, her list of proposed legal and political solutions cannot stand alone. She argues that these reforms must grow out of a rigorous philosophical framework that sets the rejection of colorblindness as its first principle. Considering how deeply American society absorbed the notion of colorblindness as the worthiest of goals, Alexander takes pains to dispel this modern American myth. She explains, “The colorblindness ideal is premised on the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat each other fairly or with genuine compassion” (302). Even in the arguably post-colorblind era of 2020, numerous individuals may take issue with the premise that colorblindness isn’t worth pursuing. Yet it is important to note that Alexander’s intent isn’t to reject colorblindness as it might exist in a vacuum but to reject it as a strategy for navigating contemporary American society, a society that is still shaped by its racial origins and history—and that exists in a larger world defined by racial boundaries.
This chapter includes another of the more provocative arguments in the book: that not only do civil rights lawyers devote too much energy to preserving affirmative action, but that affirmative action plays a significant role in the perpetuation of mass incarceration. The kneejerk reaction of some racial justice advocates may be to bristle at this assertion, given the extent to which affirmation action has transformed the lives of countless Black men and women. Yet to Alexander, affirmation action exists as a similar–albeit better-intentioned–version of the racial bribes that help perpetuate systems of social control. The elevation of a small group of African Americans to the very highest echelons of American society aids and abets Americans’ ability to deny that structural racism exists. This is akin to Alexander’s earlier argument that most Americans would be outraged if 100% of those arrested for drug crimes were Black, but that 90% is an acceptable number. Even more insidious is the extent to which the small number of exceptional African Americans supports one of the most important precepts undergirding the system of mass incarceration: that it is voluntary. In a rhetorical question, Alexander asks, “How could a caste system exist, in view of the black middle class?” (308).
Finally, Alexander offers her vision of the future, one that involves a list of discrete reforms to the criminal justice system and a transformative vision of a movement that abandons an us-versus-them dichotomy and embraces “all of us” (320), Black and white alike. This solution walks a precarious line between calling for a system that benefits all poor and working-class people, regardless of color, while also acknowledging the outsized role race plays in the construction and maintenance of the status quo. Writing from the vantage point of the Great Recession, Alexander worries that if America does dismantle mass incarceration, it will justify doing so on the basis of fiscal conservatism rather than race. If the political debate concerning defunding the police after George Floyd’s death is any indication, her worries are well-founded. In many corners, immense budget shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 virus have played a significant role in discussions over decreasing police funding. According to The Guardian, government officials “have long dismissed the idea as a leftist fantasy, but the recent unrest and massive budget shortfalls from the Covid-19 crisis appear to have inspired more mainstream recognition of the central arguments behind defunding.” (Levin, Sam. “Movement to Defund Police Gains ‘Unprecedented Support Across US.” The Guardian. 4 Jun. 2020.) At the same time, it seems evident that ascendant grassroots racial justice organizations will work hard to keep race at the center of reform movements.