Black People : New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander - Part 1 - Democracy Now!

Now combine what Michelle Alexander and the murdered Gary Webb are saying with The Reagan/Bush administration's Iran Contra conspiracy which can also be called the Crack Epidemic Conspiracy which flooded black neighborhoods with weaponized, highly addictive, illegal cocaine.. and the congressional creation of The Industrial Prison Complex by that same Reagan/Bush administration.. and.. I almost forgot the moneyshot.... The War On Drugs which began with the Antidrug Act of 1986 , which, by the way, was introduced in congress by vice president Bush's colleague Rep Jim Wright of Texas and signed into law by that same Reagan/Bush administration that flooded the streets with illegal drugs in the first place.

Now take all of that, and label it, "The Covert Reemergence of Black Slavery, 1980 - Present"... or " And The Beat Goes On"... or "The Reniggafication Of The Black Masses".. or "One Emancipation Don't Stop No Show".. or the pretty tonyesque, "Once I Get A Bit**, I Got A Bit**"..

Now preface all of that with what Douglas Blackmon is saying here in Slavery By Another Name..



Then.. crack open your American History book, grab a black marker and draw a straight line through THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA.. now go back to right after where it says, CIVIL WAR, next it should say RECONSTRUCTION.. take that pen and add the words, "OF SLAVERY, 1863 - 1988" to the end of it. yeah.. like that... that's better..

now, rethink everything you ever thought about the predicament of African people in america.. and also the causes of that predicament..
 
What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?
The school-to-prison pipeline begins in deep social and economic inequalities, and has taken root in the historic shortcomings of schooling in this country. The civil and human rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s spurred an effort to “rethink schools” to make them responsive to the needs of all students, their families, and communities. This rethinking included collaborative learning environments, multicultural curriculum, student-centered, experiential pedagogy—we were aiming for education as liberation. The back-to-basics backlash against that struggle has been more rigid enforcement of ever more alienating curriculum.
The “zero tolerance” policies that today are the most extreme form of this punishment paradigm were originally written for the war on drugs in the early 1980s, and later applied to schools. As Annette Fuentes explains, the resulting extraordinary rates of suspension and expulsion are linked nationally to increasing police presence, checkpoints, and surveillance inside schools.
As police have set up shop in schools across the country, the definition of what is a crime as opposed to a teachable moment has changed in extraordinary ways. In one middle school we’re familiar with, a teacher routinely allowed her students to take single pieces of candy from a big container she kept on her desk. One day, several girls grabbed handfuls. The teacher promptly sent them to the police officer assigned to the school. What formerly would have been an opportunity to have a conversation about a minor transgression instead became a law enforcement issue.
Children are being branded as criminals at ever-younger ages. Zero Tolerance in Philadelphia, a recent report by Youth United for Change and the Advancement Project, offers an example:

Robert was an 11-year-old in 5th grade who, in his rush to get to school on time, put on a dirty pair of pants from the laundry basket. He did not notice that his Boy Scout pocketknife was in one of the pockets until he got to school. He also did not notice that it fell out when he was running in gym class. When the teacher found it and asked whom it belonged to, Robert volunteered that it was his, only to find himself in police custody minutes later. He was arrested, suspended, and transferred to a disciplinary school.​
Early contact with police in schools often sets students on a path of alienation, suspension, expulsion, and arrests. George Galvis, an Oakland, Calif., prison activist and youth organizer, described his first experience with police at his school: “I was 11. There was a fight and I got called to the office. The cop punched me in the face. I looked at my principal and he was just standing there, not saying anything. That totally broke my trust in school as a place that was safe for me.”
Galvis added: “The more police there are in the school, walking the halls and looking at surveillance tapes, the more what constitutes a crime escalates. And what is seen as ‘how kids act’ vs. criminal behavior has a lot to do with race. I always think about the fistfights that break out between fraternities at the Cal campus, and how those fights are seen as opposed to what the police see as gang-related fights, even if the behavior is the same.”
Mass Incarceration: A Civil Rights Crisis
The growth of the school-to-prison pipeline is part of a larger crisis. Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has exploded from about 325,000 people to more than 2 million today. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, this is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by crime rates or drug use. According to Human Rights Watch (Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, 2000) although whites are more likely to violate drug laws than people of color, in some states black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men. Latina/os, Native Americans, and other people of color are also imprisoned at rates far higher than their representation in the population. Once released, former prisoners are caught in a web of laws and regula....
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/08-0
 
Transcript:

Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”


A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

* Michelle Alexander: "The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare"

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.

A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice
Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.

The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.

And the strategy worked like a charm. You know, within weeks of the Reagan administration’s publicity campaign around crack cocaine, you know, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded, you know, our nation’s television sets and forever changed our nation’s conception of who drug users and dealers are. And law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in the drug war. And drug law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement task forces committed to drug law enforcement, have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Federal funding flows to state and local law enforcement that boost the volume of drug arrests, the sheer numbers.

Many people think the drug war, you know, has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at rooting out drug kingpins, but nothing could be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars, homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders, granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in the drug war.

And the results have been predictable. Millions of poor people of color have been rounded up for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. And during the 1990s, the period of the greatest expansion of the drug war, nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug now widely believed to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class and suburban white communities as it is in the ghetto.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: President Clinton—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, I just wanted to bring it up to President Obama, because this piece you wrote, very interesting, at tomdispatch.com called “The Age of Obama as Racial Nightmare.” Explain.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, you know, today, people around the globe, people of color in particular, have been celebrating the election of Barack Obama as kind of our nation’s triumph over race and the history of racial caste in America. Yet, the appearance of racial equality, the superficial appearance of racial equality that Barack Obama’s election has afforded, serves to mask a deeply disturbing underlying racial reality, which is that large segments, you know, a majority, of African American men in some urban areas, are either under the control of the criminal justice system or branded felons for life, locked in a permanent second-class status.

This vast new racial undercaste—and I say “caste”, not “class,” because this is a population which is locked into an inferior status by law and by policy—this vast population has been rendered largely invisible through affirmative action and the appearance of success with, you know, a handful of African Americans doing well in universities and corporations. The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress. It helps to mask the underlying racial reality, which is that a racial caste system has been reborn in the United States. Young men of color, in particular, are labeled as felons, labeled as criminals, at very young ages, often before they even reach voting age, before they turn eighteen. Their backpacks are searched. They’re frisked on the way to school, while standing waiting for the school bus to arrive. Once they learn to drive, their cars are searched, often dismantled in a search for drugs. The drug war waged in these poor communities of color has created generations of black and brown people who have been branded felons and relegated to a permanent second-class status for life.

And the reason for their excommunication from our society, our mainstream society, is for engaging in precisely the same kind of drug activity that is largely ignored in middle-class and upper-middle-class white communities. People often say to me, “Well, if people—if, you know, black and brown men don’t want to be labeled felons, well, then they just shouldn’t commit drug crimes.” But, you know, we have known, as a nation, for a long time now that simply prohibiting drug activity does not lead people to stop using illegal drugs. We learned that lesson with alcohol prohibition. Banning the use of alcohol didn’t discourage many people from using or selling alcohol. And people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. Our stereotype of a drug dealer in the United States is of an African American kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down. But the reality is that drug dealing happens everywhere in America. Drug markets in the United States, much like our society generally, is relatively segregated by race. Blacks tend to sell to blacks. Whites tend to sell to whites.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there for the part one of this interview, Michelle Alexander, but we’re going to ask you to stay after for part two, which we’ll play on Democracy Now! Michelle Alexander, her new book is called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.


Good info here
 
Kemetstry ...
Re: http://destee.com/index.php?threads...han-national-average.71030/page-5#post-731984

We went a little overboard here didnt we? Generation next dropped the bll. Many ASSumed the civil rights fight was over. In fact, many still resent they actually have to do their part. I will also state, my generation dropped the ball in raising their kids. Too many went for presents instead of presence in raising their kids. We see the results today
..
overboard? how so?
it's wild how the aggression and actions of the white world are invisible to you. All you see is black dysfunction and failure. You speak to the fight but not about what we are fighting against.. or why we are fighting against it.. you list the symptoms.. the results of processes and programs and assaults.. but give not a single line of commentary to the phenomena that produced those results/symptoms.. it's almost a talent.. Willful blindness.
It's almost exactly the same phenomena that I named, "MissMillie-ism" in another thread. It's based on that scene in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple".. where the white townspeope are assaulting sophia for punching the Mayor.. his slapping her didn't matter.. his wife's insult to Miss Sophia also didn't matter.. only Miss Sophia's reaction was judged. Your rhetoric has the same effect as those white townspeople's actions. You surround us with your negative comments about black women and black men, without giving any weight to the causes..
Jim Crow was the formal and shameless codification of The destruction of black families.. of black people.. Jim Crow was white societies organized effort to isolate black folks in every way.. to remove us as threats to their dominance.. to contain us and our strivings.. our potential.. our progress.. and to keep us in the places that they'd built their entire way of life atop.
Black folks were killed with impunity under Jim Crow laws.. imprisoned for forced labor.. re-enslaved.. raped, lynched.. terrorized.. Jim Crow laws created the structure of our lives. Crime is an economic symptom. And it's always higher among the desolate.. among the abused.. among the hungry. White people, through the creation and enforcement of Jim Crow laws, created our desolation.. our hunger.. our despair.
Have you read this thread? Read it.. and then re-run your comparative criticism of black folks during and after Jim Crow. And it's worth noting that.. in the same way that Jim Crow laws were enacted as a response to legal end of Slavery and had the effect of keeping things as close as possible to the way they were before the Civil War.. similarly, at the legal end of Jim Crow (1964), a new set of laws aimed at physically, politically, socially and psychologically containing black life came into being. And just as during Slavery and Jim Crow, the Law was just one of the vehicles of bringing the will of the people to fruition. Private citizens acted alone and also in groups aimed at holding black folk down as close to servitude as possible. The KKK is an example of such a group. And the unwritten social codes that existed in local communities are another example.

Anyway.. I'm interested in your take on the information contained in this thread. I want to see if there is anything here that adds to, takes away or supports your conclusion that it.. meaning our condition as a people.. is all a matter of the behavior of Black People.
 
Kemetstry ...
Re: http://destee.com/index.php?threads...han-national-average.71030/page-5#post-731984


overboard? how so?
it's wild how the aggression and actions of the white world are invisible to you. All you see is black dysfunction and failure. You speak to the fight but not about what we are fighting against.. or why we are fighting against it.. you list the symptoms.. the results of processes and programs and assaults.. but give not a single line of commentary to the phenomena that produced those results/symptoms.. it's almost a talent.. Willful blindness.
It's almost exactly the same phenomena that I named, "MissMillie-ism" in another thread. It's based on that scene in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple".. where the white townspeope are assaulting sophia for punching the Mayor.. his slapping her didn't matter.. his wife's insult to Miss Sophia also didn't matter.. only Miss Sophia's reaction was judged. Your rhetoric has the same effect as those white townspeople's actions. You surround us with your negative comments about black women and black men, without giving any weight to the causes..
Jim Crow was the formal and shameless codification of The destruction of black families.. of black people.. Jim Crow was white societies organized effort to isolate black folks in every way.. to remove us as threats to their dominance.. to contain us and our strivings.. our potential.. our progress.. and to keep us in the places that they'd built their entire way of life atop.
Black folks were killed with impunity under Jim Crow laws.. imprisoned for forced labor.. re-enslaved.. raped, lynched.. terrorized.. Jim Crow laws created the structure of our lives. Crime is an economic symptom. And it's always higher among the desolate.. among the abused.. among the hungry. White people, through the creation and enforcement of Jim Crow laws, created our desolation.. our hunger.. our despair.
Have you read this thread? Read it.. and then re-run your comparative criticism of black folks during and after Jim Crow. And it's worth noting that.. in the same way that Jim Crow laws were enacted as a response to legal end of Slavery and had the effect of keeping things as close as possible to the way they were before the Civil War.. similarly, at the legal end of Jim Crow (1964), a new set of laws aimed at physically, politically, socially and psychologically containing black life came into being. And just as during Slavery and Jim Crow, the Law was just one of the vehicles of bringing the will of the people to fruition. Private citizens acted alone and also in groups aimed at holding black folk down as close to servitude as possible. The KKK is an example of such a group. And the unwritten social codes that existed in local communities are another example.

Anyway.. I'm interested in your take on the information contained in this thread. I want to see if there is anything here that adds to, takes away or supports your perspective.

sigh

There is no new Jim Crow. The difference is, back then, they didnt need a charge, they just arrested you. Today, we provide them with charges gift rapped. I dont want to hear, the white boy had powder and he got a slap on the wrist. Had you listened to real black men of old, you NEVER would have gotten involved in the dope game. Black on black crime is a self inflicted injury that cant be blamed on whitey! We were poor and a lot worse and didnt do this to each other. We preached education from the pulpit. Families stayed together no matter what.

I see what is.


..
 

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