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

Born in Chicago in 1967, Michelle Alexander is a civil rights advocate, professor, and columnist for The New York Times. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she earned her law degree from Stanford Law School. From 1998 until 2005, Alexander served as the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program in Northern California. Near the start of her tenure there, Alexander came across a flyer proclaiming, “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW” (4). At the time, she considered the slogan hyperbolic at best and harmful to efforts to combat racial bias in the criminal justice system at worst. While Alexander acknowledged the extreme biases evident in the criminal justice system, she attributed this to broader trends of systemic racism observable across American institutions, not to a concerted effort of social control.

Over time, however, Alexander began to view the War on Drugs and mass incarceration as agents driving a new racial undercaste in America, an experience she recounts in an interview in The New Yorker. A major turning point came when interviewing potential plaintiffs for a class-action suit against the Oakland Police Department. A 19-year-old African American man came into her office with a stack of papers detailing every interaction he had with police officers over a nine-month period, including officers’ names, badge numbers, and witnesses.