The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” 

Alexander starkly encapsulates how mass incarceration most resembles the Jim Crow era. It is difficult to read that list of denied rights and not be reminded of a time when Black Americans were, for all intents and purposes, second-class citizens—a time most believe America abandoned decades ago. This quote also introduces the concept of the racial caste, which she describes as such because it represents a social status that is determined by heredity.

“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, in light of the devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug war had been declared.”

Alexander does not use the word genocide lightly, not even to describe a multidecade campaign that cost the lives and freedom of countless Black males. At the same time, she is sensitive to those who use this word to describe mass incarceration and the War on Drugs. This is because what sets mass incarceration apart from the Jim Crow era and even slavery is that those were systems of labor exploitation, while mass incarceration is a system of marginalization and removal.

“In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black man held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of all Southern elected officials were black. This is particularly extraordinary in light of the fact that fifteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the high water mark of the Civil Rights Movement—fewer than 8 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.” 

This quote serves two purposes: For one, it indicates Reconstruction’s profound yet brief success at giving long-denied political power to Black Americans. The quote also supports one of Alexander’s key arguments that much of Black progress since the end of the Civil War is illusory. As of the 2018 election, only 12% of US House Representatives are Black, and only 3% of US Senators are Black.

“History seemed to repeat itself. Just as the white elite had successfully driven a wedge between poor whites and blacks following Bacon’s Rebellion by creating the institution of black slavery, another racial caste system was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by white elites to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people.” 

To Alexander, the “racial bribes” offered to poor whites to justify systems of racial oppression, along with efforts to divide poor and working-class Americans by race, are crucial components of the pattern of racial caste-making. In the case of mass incarceration, Alexander argues that President Nixon and President Reagan used coded rhetoric to appeal to white racial anxieties and build a new Republican coalition following the collapse of the Democratic New Deal coalition. A similar pattern may be discerned in the coded and not-so-coded rhetoric of Donald Trump to justify what Alexander views as a shift from mass incarceration to mass detention and deportation of Latinx immigrants.

“If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.”

Alexander quotes New York Times columnist Adam Walinsky writing in 1986. She calls him one of the lone voices of dissent as media outlets embraced Reagan’s racially tinged rhetoric on crack cocaine. Alexander acknowledges the damage crack cocaine caused to urban communities that were already reeling from heavy employment losses due to deindustrialization and globalization. At the same time, she characterizes crack cocaine as an ex post facto justification for the War on Drugs, which was declared years before crack hit the street.

“Undoubtedly, the political and cultural context of the drug war—particularly in the early years—encouraged the roundup. When politicians declare a drug war, the police (our domestic warriors) undoubtedly feel some pressure to wage it. But it is doubtful that the drug war would have been launched with such intensity on the ground but for the bribes offered for law enforcement’s cooperation.” 

One of the most important questions Alexander addresses is why the police—an organization historically thought to have local autonomy—would almost overnight shift its priorities in line with the federal War on Drugs. The answer, she writes, is twofold. For one, the prevailing social, cultural, and political rhetoric of the era reflected an almost obsessive fixation on ridding the streets of drugs and drug criminals. Just as important, however, were the financial incentives the federal government offered to police departments in return for their participation in the War on Drugs.

“One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.” 

This quote is crucial to Alexander’s entire argument. If the data revealed that Black Americans in any category used and sold drugs at dramatically higher rates than whites, then one could argue that the absurdly disproportionate racial outcomes of the War on Drugs were not necessarily the result of individual and collective biases. Yet given that across most categories drug crime is the same for white and Black Americans, the disparities in arrests and sentencing must be attributed to both bias and the system’s purpose as a method of social control, according to Alexander.

“Although explicitly racial political appeals remained rare, the calls for ‘war’ at a time when the media was saturated with images of black drug crime left little doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs and exactly what he looked like.” 

Alexander provides a stark example of how a racial caste is built in the era of colorblindness. It was hardly necessary for police officers to be told to target men of color, Alexander writes, because the media as a political apparatus at that time had already defined Black men as criminals in the cultural imagination, through a combination of imagery and racial “dog whistle” rhetoric. This casting of Black men as criminals was also self-reinforcing, in that the more men of color police arrested and incarcerated, the more Americans understood this association as fact rather than myth.

“Like the days when black men were expected to step off the sidewalk and cast their eyes downward when a white woman passed, young black men know the drill when they see the police crossing the street toward them; it is a ritual of dominance and submission played out hundreds of thousands of times each year.” 

Alexander briefly examines the similarities between mass incarceration and the Jim Crow era through a psychological lens. The stigmatizing effects of each era are not only internalized but also externalized in the form of social customs and etiquette, any breach of which may result in violence. The era of mass incarceration differs from Jim Crow, however, in that the state generally has a monopoly on doling out this violence in such situations.

“The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.” 

“Closing the courthouse doors” is a motif Alexander frequently revisits throughout the book. The extent to which the Supreme Court has gutted the Fourth and Sixth Amendments in service of the War of Drugs gives her little hope that the judiciary is a suitable avenue for resolving claims of racial bias in the criminal justice system. She is far more optimistic about the potential of grassroots mobilizations that place political pressure on elected officials.

“Following the election, it was widely reported that, had the 600,000 formerly incarcerated people who had completed their sentence in Florida been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have been elected president of the United States rather than George W. Bush.” 

Alexander writes of the outsized political consequences of denying the incarcerated and the recently incarcerated the right to vote. This is also a dramatic illustration of the ultimate fruits of the Republican Party’s creation of the War on Drugs. That said, it should also be noted that President Clinton, a Democrat, accelerated the War on Drugs more than any other US president, according to Alexander.

“During Jim Crow, blacks were severely stigmatized and segregated on the basis of race, but in their own communities they could find support, solidarity, acceptance—love. Today, when those labeled criminals return to their communities, they are often met with scorn and contempt, not just by employers, welfare workers, and housing officials, but also by their own neighbors, teachers, and even members of their own families.” 

This observation belongs to one of a handful of categories of ways in which mass incarceration is even worse than Jim Crow. The silence of urban communities on the topic of incarceration is among the most regrettable yet understandable consequences of the War on Drugs, Alexander writes. Moreover, the extent to which families and communities are ripped apart by mass incarceration only perpetuates the suffering of the recently incarcerated as they sit trapped on the closed circuit of the criminal justice system.

“There is absolutely nothing abnormal or surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. [...] Indeed, the act of embracing one’s stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act—an act of resistance and defiance in a society that seeks to demean a group based on an inalterable trait.” 

Alexander is deeply torn about the legacy of gangsta rap as a response to mass incarceration and the War on Drugs. On one hand, she cannot abide the embrace of criminality or the misogyny expressed in some gangsta rap. On the other hand, it is difficult for her to blame an individual for embracing their own culturally imposed stigma as a coping mechanism. Moreover, she believes that the shame should not belong to the stigmatized but to those who are either active or passive participants in the act of stigmatization.

“In fact, what is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of prison against all the odds. Considering the design of this new system of control, it is astonishing that so many people labeled criminals still manage to care for and feed their children, hold together marriages, obtain employment, and start businesses.” 

Alexander contradicts the bootstraps narrative of moral uplift that causes people to expect victims of mass incarceration to succeed, despite the fact that everything about the system conspires against them. When a formerly incarcerated individual is arrested again, or the son of an incarcerated individual is arrested, too often people attribute this to a moral failing. Yet while individual agency is capable of powerful things, it is not enough to simply expect individuals to cope with a grossly unjust system as opposed to addressing the system itself.

“The launching of the War on Drugs and the initial construction of the new system required the expenditure of tremendous political initiative and resources. Media campaigns were waged; politicians blasted ‘soft’ judges and enacted harsh sentencing laws; poor people of color were vilified. The system now, however, requires very little maintenance or justification. In fact, if you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug war is still going on.”

This is a remarkable quote that speaks to the insidious success of the War of Drugs. Unlike slavery and Jim Crow, the racial caste system of mass incarceration became invisible for a huge number of Americans, even in cities where the war is waged with the greatest ferocity. Indeed, it is easy to think of the War of Drugs as a relic of the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the crack crisis and other images of urban crime dominated airwaves. Yet while media and political discourse turned to the War on Terror, the War on Drugs continued largely unabated years into the 21st century, peaking in 2008.

“Preoccupation with the role of racial hostility in earlier caste systems can blind us to the ways in which every caste system, including mass incarceration, has been supported by racial indifference—a lack of care and compassion for people of other races.” 

The lack of overt and visible racial hostility associated with mass incarceration is one of its features that allows it to persist in an era of colorblindness. Because Americans traditionally associate racial injustice with images of slavery, the KKK, and virulent segregations, the race-neutral terminology in which mass incarceration is couched leads many to a state of plausible deniability regarding the racial factors in play. Moreover, slavery and Jim Crow could have never persisted as long as they did without widespread indifference to the suffering of Black men and women.

“We, as a nation, seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure were 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.” 

According to Alexander, a troubling number of Americans are willing to find any excuse to deny that racial factors contribute to grossly disproportionate racial outcomes. This is the insidious genius of mass incarceration compared to other racial caste systems. No whites were subject to Jim Crow laws (aside from anti-miscegenation laws). And yet the significant albeit comparatively small number of white people who are victims of the War of Drugs allow its defenders to claim that the system is race-neutral.

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary.” 

Unlike Jim Crow and slavery, the branding of Black men as criminals in America’s cultural imagination allows defenders of mass incarceration to argue that to become a victim of the War on Drugs is to have chosen to break the law. Aside from the significant number of people under correctional control who are innocent, this is true as far as it goes. Yet given the lasting devastation visited in disproportionate degrees upon the lives of so many people of color, Alexander counsels compassion for individuals who, like all humans, make mistakes.

“The intuition underlying moral-uplift strategies is fundamentally sound; our communities will never thrive if we fail to respect ourselves and one another. As a liberation strategy, however, the politics of responsibility is doomed to fail—not because there is something especially wrong with those locked in ghettos or prisons today, but because there is nothing special about them.” 

Alexander strongly believes in efforts of individual agency to improve one’s own life and the lives of others. This is not, however, an effective political strategy at dismantling a system of social control as vast and efficient as mass incarceration. Moreover, for Americans to lay the responsibility solely on individuals to escape systems designed specifically to trap them, they relinquish their own responsibility as passive, racially indifferent participants.

“It’s actually better to be exploited than marginalized, in some respects, because if you’re exploited presumably you’re still needed.” 

This disturbing quote by legal scholar John A. Powell emphasizes the extent to which the widespread marginalization and removal based on racial, hereditary lines is frequently a precursor to genocide. This is not to say that a genocide is imminent against Black males in the United States. Nor does it suggest that slavery or Jim Crow were “better” than mass incarceration because those were systems of labor exploitation rather than marginalization. However, the quote does reveal troubling truths about what America’s systems of social control say about the value the country collectively places on Black men.

“Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though, only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.” 

Another one of the most important facets of Alexander’s broader argument is the notion that mass incarceration, though advertised as a system of crime prevention, is ineffective at its stated goals. If anything, mass incarceration causes greater violence by dropping Black men into a cycle of poverty and desperation upon their release. For that reason, Alexander sees no other conclusion to draw from the considerable time and resources devoted to the drug war than that the system is designed for what it’s best at: social control.

“Taken together, these factors suggest that, if a major mobilization got under way, impressive changes in our nation’s drug laws and policies would be not only possible, but likely, without ever saying a word about race. This is tempting bait, to put it mildly, but racial justice advocates should not take it.” 

Particularly from the vantage point of the Great Recession, during which Alexander researched and published The New Jim Crow, race-neutral calls to reform the criminal justice system on the basis of fiscal conservatism might seem like an alluring strategy to advocates who wish to sway Republicans to their cause. Indeed, there are no shortage of white papers from libertarian think tanks that argue the conservative case for criminal justice reform. Yet Alexander insists that any effort to dismantle mass incarceration that does not include race at the center of the conversation risks allowing a new system of racialized social control to take its place.

“The truth, however, is this: far from undermining the current system of control, the new caste system depends, in no small part, on black exceptionalism.” 

Alexander seeks to illustrate the connection between affirmative action and mass incarceration. Of all the factors contributing to mass incarceration, affirmative action may seem like an unlikely suspect. Yet Alexander argues that part of what distinguishes mass incarceration from earlier racial caste systems is that its defenders can point to Black CEOs, Black lawyers, and even a Black president to illustrate that anyone can succeed in the current system, and that mass incarceration is not a system of racialized social control. Moreover, Black exceptionalism has the unintended effect of casting Black criminals as victims of their own failure to succeed in an illusory meritocracy.