thesis of the new jim crow

Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow Research Paper

Overall thesis from the new jim crow.

In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explains the challenges that people of color face in modern American society. Her overall thesis from this book is “that mass incarceration constitutes a new system of racial oppression akin to slavery and the original Jim Crow” (Alexander, 32). She argues that in the current Age of Colorblindness, the unique challenges that people of color faced during the era of Jim Crow laws still persist. The only difference is that the approach taken by people in positions of power has changed. The society is currently using the criminal justice system as a tool to oppress people of color. According to this book, there is a disproportionately high number of blacks incarcerated in various prisons across the country.

War on drugs has been an excellent excuse that law enforcement officers use to ensure that they send these minorities to prison. According to Purnell et al., it is more likely for a black to be taken to court when arrested with a small amount of bhang or marijuana than a white (37). It is also easier to convince the judge and the jury that the black man was doing drugs. In terms of sentencing, a black man is more likely to be given a severe punishment than a white man, even if they committed the same offense. The color of the skin is, therefore, used as a means of defining one’s guilt in the current criminal justice system. The main problem is that this form of discrimination has been repackaged as the war on drugs or crime (Adler 38). This strategy has worked so well that even the black community does not realize they are targeted until they become victims of police brutality and the skewed criminal justice system

Significant Cases Discussed in the New Jim Crow and Their Ramifications on Her Thesis

In this book, Alexander argues that American society has entered a new age of legalized discrimination. The language and approaches used have changed over time, but the intent and pain caused to the victims have remained the same. In her book, she has singled out specific cases that explain the era of the New Jim Crow. The following are some of the major cases.

Employment Discrimination

The majority of large corporate institutions and government agencies are owned and managed by whites. The book opines that when employers are presented with a case where they have to choose either a black or a white with similar qualifications, they are more likely to choose white. In some cases, a white would be chosen even if they had an inferior qualification to a black candidate (Austin 11). The reason given would be that the most qualified person was chosen. The truth is that the qualification was based on one’s skin color as opposed to one’s ability to undertake a specific task. Such discrimination is widespread both in the public and private sectors, and it is packaged in a unique form that fighting it has been a major challenge.

Housing Discrimination

The housing sector is another area where minorities in the United States face massive challenges. In public housing, there is open discrimination against blacks when rolling out various programs. In the final stages of approval, one’s race becomes one of the defining factors of whether an individual would be given a house. In the private sector, the problem is even worse, as Austin observes (17). Realtors would deliberately deny a black person an opportunity to buy or rent a house within a given neighborhood primarily because of their race. There is the fear that if the black is given a house in a neighborhood considered exclusively white, there might be an uproar. Some of the current customers may consider leaving the place, while prospective clients would consider buying or renting a house in other places. In an effort to protect their profits and revenue, they would deny an opportunity to live in these neighborhoods.

Denial of the Right to Vote

Alexander argues that blacks form the largest group of disenfranchised voters in the United States. According to Purnell et al., voting is one of the fundamental rights of every American citizen of the right age and of sound mind (51). However, in some parts of the country, there have been deliberate steps taken to ensure that the ability to vote is compromised as much as possible. In some cases, the legality of their voting rights would be questioned, while in other cases, systemic strategies would be used. The goal is to ensure that they do not participate in determining the political leadership of the country. When their votes do not count, it becomes easy for the policy-makers to ignore their plight.

Denial of Educational Opportunity

Education has remained the single most powerful tool for eradicating poverty and empowering the disadvantaged in the society. However, the type of school one attends would define the social networks that they develops and the skills one acquire, which would then play pivotal roles in defining their career success. Some of the best universities in this country, such as Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and Columbia University, have been accused of bias when admitting students across the country. Austin explains that it is not easy for a poor black student to get admission into these institutions (36). Besides the open bias when selecting students, there is also the challenge of the cost of tuition and other charges, which further limits the ability of poor students to attend these institutions.

Denial of Food Stamps and Other Public Benefits

The United States government has various social protection programs meant to help the very poor members of society. One such program is food stamps, which is meant to ensure that no American citizen would starve (Adler 57). This program is meant for the poorest of Americans and should be issued without any form of discrimination. The problem is that government officials responsible for managing such programs are biased. It is common to find cases where food items are not made sufficiently available to those with food stamps. Such services would be rationed in areas dominated by minorities, especially African Americans (Kilgore 290). Different administrations come to power promising to solve this problem, but most often, they fail to do so.

Exclusion from Jury Service

The book also identifies another challenge with the criminal justice system in the country, which is the exclusion from jury services. It is a common practice for a judge to invite the jury to help in determining whether a suspect is guilty of a crime leveled against them. African Americans are in the best position to understand the plight that their people face and why they would act in a given manner (Austin 78). As members of the jury, they can help to explain events that led to the suspect acting in a given way. Unfortunately, they are rarely chosen to be members of the jury. As such, blacks are left in the hands and at the mercy of whites, who already have informed opinions and are keen on confirming their guilt. When they retire to discuss the case, they start from the point that the suspect is guilty and then focus on finding justifications for the same. It is almost impossible for blacks to get justice in such a system.

Ramifications of These Cases on Her Thesis

These cases, which outline specific ways in which blacks face discrimination, help to reaffirm her thesis. Adler explains that there is always a need to distinguish inflammatory, baseless claims from real challenges that need to be addressed (39). Alexander provides specific cases that can easily be traced and confirmed to explain the New Jim Crow. She makes her case believable by providing information that is already known to American society. For instance, the claim that most of the prestigious universities in the country are out of reach for poor African Americans can easily be confirmed. At Harvey Mudd College, a student is expected to pay $79,539 annually (Ryan 45). The average income in the United States is $63,214, while that of African Americans is $48,297 (Ryan 45). Even if one is willing to pay everything they earn for their child’s fee, they cannot afford it. In this case, cost has been used effectively to deny the poor an opportunity to get the best in education.

Personal Reflection on Her Overall

I agree with Alexander’s overall thesis because they can easily be confirmed. A good example is the brutal and emotive death of George Floyd in 2020. Derek Chauvin, a white police officer with the authority to arrest, deliberately knelt on George’s neck for about 9 minutes (Reny and Newman 1504). The victim’s plea that he could not breathe was ignored, and he suffocated to death. The issue was taken seriously by the government, and Derek was convicted, but many believe this was possible because the merciless murder was recorded and shared publicly. Several similar cases where law enforcement agencies use unnecessary excessive force have been witnessed in this country. The problem is that those who commit the crime are the same people who are expected to protect civilians.

I agree with the claims made by Alexander that the New Jim Crow is as effective in persecuting minorities, especially African Americans, as the old forms of discrimination. According to a report by Purnell et al., the highest population group of inmates in the country is blacks, at 33%, while whites account for 30% (34). It is important to note that the total population of blacks in the United States is only 12%, while whites account for 64% (Ryan 45). The statistics show that an African American is six times more likely to end up in prison than a white person is. The trend is worrying because the concentration of police officers in black neighborhoods is significantly higher than in white-dominated neighborhoods. As Alexander puts it, the problem of racism and systemic discrimination is still alive in the country.

Works Cited

Adler, Jeffrey. Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing . University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Alexander, Michelle. New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . The New Press, 2012.

Austin, Paula. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life . New York University Press, 2019.

Kilgore, James. “Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving Beyond the New Jim Crow.” Critical Sociology , vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 283-295.

Purnell, Brian, et al. The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South . New York University Press, 2019.

Reny, Tyler, and Benjamin Newman. “The Opinion-Mobilizing Effect of Social Protest against Police Violence: Evidence from the 2020 George Floyd Protests.” American Political Science Review , vol. 115, no. 4, 2021, pp. 1499-1507.

Ryan, Mary. Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics: Employment Earnings Prices Productivity and Other Labor Data 2021 . Bernan Press, 2021.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 27). Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alexanders-overall-thesis-from-the-new-jim-crow/

"Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow." IvyPanda , 27 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/alexanders-overall-thesis-from-the-new-jim-crow/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow'. 27 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow." November 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alexanders-overall-thesis-from-the-new-jim-crow/.

1. IvyPanda . "Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow." November 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alexanders-overall-thesis-from-the-new-jim-crow/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Alexander’s Overall Thesis From the New Jim Crow." November 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/alexanders-overall-thesis-from-the-new-jim-crow/.

• Law History From Jim Crow to Civil Rights Movement
• Black Codes, Jim Crow, and Segregation Impact on African Americans in the US
• The New Jim Crow System Related to the Black Population
• Body Positivity and Fat Acceptance
• Adjusting to Ageing Post Retirement
• The Impact of the Social Environment on Self-Identity
• Sexual Slavery and Human Smuggling
• The Settlement of Sixties Scoop Class Action

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Ten Years After “The New Jim Crow”

By David Remnick

Sometimes a book comes along and, after it is absorbed into the culture, we cannot see ourselves again in quite the same way. Ten years ago, Michelle Alexander, a lawyer and civil-rights advocate, published “ The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness .” This was less than two years into Barack Obama’s first term as President, a moment when you heard a lot of euphoric talk about post-racialism and “how far we’ve come.” “The New Jim Crow” was hardly an immediate best-seller, but after a couple of years it took off and seemed to be at the center of discussion about criminal-justice reform and racism in America. The book considers not only the enormity and cruelty of the American prison system but also, as Alexander writes, the way the war on drugs and the justice system have been used as a “system of control” that shatters the lives of millions of Americans—particularly young black and Hispanic men.

As part of an hour-long examination of mass incarceration for The New Yorker Radio Hour, co-hosted this week by Kai Wright, of WNYC, I caught up with Michelle Alexander, who is now teaching at Union Theological Seminary, in New York.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When “The New Jim Crow” came out, a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for “the person I was ten years ago.” Take me back to those times and to the work you were doing for the A.C.L.U. What were you finding out?

That would have been twenty years ago from today. It was just as I was beginning my work with the A.C.L.U. I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal-justice system, and that bias pervaded all of our political, social, and economic systems. That’s why I was a civil-rights lawyer: I was hoping to finish the work that had been begun by civil-rights leaders who came before me. I had a very romantic idea of what civil-rights lawyers had done and could do to address the challenges that we face.

My impression back then was that our criminal-justice system was infected with racial bias, much in the same way that all institutions in our society are infected to some degree or another with racial and gender bias. But what I didn’t understand at that time was that a new system of racial and social control had been born again in America, a system eerily reminiscent to those that we had left behind.

In fact, I was heading to work my first day at the A.C.L.U. directing the Racial Justice Project when I happened to notice a sign posted to a telephone pole that said, in bold print, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.” I remember pausing for a moment and scanning the text of the flyer and seeing that a small, apparently radical group was holding a meeting at a church several blocks away. They were organizing to protest racial profiling, the drug war, the three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and police brutality. The list went on and on. I remember thinking to myself, Yeah, the criminal-justice system is racist in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t help to make comparisons to Jim Crow. People will just think you’re crazy. And then I hopped on the bus.

So it was really as a result of myself representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality, and investigating patterns of drug-law enforcement in poor communities of color, and attempting to assist people who had been released from prison as they faced one closed door and one barrier after another to mere survival after being released from prison that I had a series of experiences that began what I have come to call my awakening.

What was that awakening like? What were you seeing in your work so that the scales were falling from your eyes?

Well, there were a number of incidents. It was partly beginning to collect data and trace patterns of policing. It was coming to see how the police were behaving in radically different ways in poor communities of color than they were in middle-class, white, or suburban communities. I mean, this wasn’t a shock to me in any way, but the scale of it was astonishing: seeing rows of black men lined up against walls being frisked and handcuffed and arrested for extremely minor crimes, like loitering, or vagrancy, or possession of tiny amounts of marijuana, and then being hauled off to jail and saddled with criminal records that authorized legal discrimination against them for the rest of their lives. I mean, witnessing it and interviewing people one after another had its impact on me.

But there was one incident in particular that really kind of rocked my world. It involved a young African-American man who was about nineteen, who walked into my office one day and forever changed the way I viewed myself as a civil-rights lawyer and the system I was up against. He walked in my office carrying a stack of papers a couple of inches thick. He had taken detailed notes of his encounters with the police over about a nine-month period: every stop, every search, every time he had been frisked or someone he was riding with had been stopped, searched, or frisked. He had names of officers, in some cases badge numbers, names of witnesses—just an extraordinary amount of documentation.

At the time, I was interviewing people for a possible class-action suit against the Oakland Police Department. We had already filed a major class-action suit against the California Highway Patrol, alleging racial profiling in their drug-interdiction program, and we had launched a major campaign against racial profiling in California, and we were looking to sue other police departments, as well. And we had set up a hotline number for people to call if they had been stopped or targeted by the police on the basis of race. Within the first few minutes of us announcing this hotline number on the evening news, we received thousands of calls, and our system crashed temporarily. So I was spending my day interviewing one young black or brown man after another who had called the hotline.

This man’s story was so compelling. I thought, Wow, maybe we have finally found our dream plaintiff. I start asking him more questions. He’s sharing more details and information. And then he said something that made me pause: Did you just say you’re a drug felon?

We had been screening people for criminal records when they called our hotline number. We would ask them a bunch of questions about their experience with the police. We sent a form for them to fill out. And one of the questions was: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? We believed we couldn’t represent anyone with a felony record because we knew that, if we did, law enforcement would be all over them, saying, Well, of course we’re keeping an eye on the criminals and stopping and harassing them. This isn’t about race. It’s about us cracking down on the criminals.

And we knew we couldn’t put someone on the stand as a named plaintiff in a class action alleging racial profiling if they had a felony record, because we'd be exposing them to cross-examination about their prior criminal history and turning it into a mini-trial about a young man’s criminal past rather than the police conduct.

So we’d been screening out people with felony records, and this young man hadn’t checked his box. I’m looking at him, saying, “O.K., you’re a drug felon. Are you telling me you’re a drug felon?” And he gets very quiet and stares down at the table and then finally looks up and says, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a drug felon. But let me tell you what happened. Police planted drugs on me, and they beat up me and my friend.” And he starts telling me this long story about how he’d been framed and drugs have been planted on him. And I just start shaking my head. I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t represent you with a felony record.” And now he’s trying to give me more details and explain more about that case. And I keep telling him, “I’m sorry, I just can’t represent you.” And he becomes more and more agitated and upset. And then, finally, he becomes enraged, and he says, “What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?”

And he starts explaining that he’d just taken the plea because he was afraid of doing the time. They told him that if he just took the plea, you just walk out with just felony probation. And he said, “But what’s to become of me? I can’t get a job anywhere because of my felony record. Do you understand? I have to sleep in my grandma’s basement at night. I can’t even get into public housing with a drug felony. It’s, like, how am I supposed to take care of myself? How am I supposed to take care of myself as a man?” He’s, like, “I can’t even feed myself. . . . Do you know I can’t even get food stamps because of my drug felony? Good luck finding one young black man in my neighborhood they haven’t gotten to yet. They’ve gotten to us all already.”

What was so provocative about the handbill that you first saw on the telephone pole, and in what became the title of your book, is that it flew in the face of what politicians said their motivation was for things like the crime bill in the mid-nineties, during the Clinton Administration. In other words, they said they were passing this legislation because crime rates were so high and drugs were out of control. What you’re saying, what that handbill said, is no, in fact, this is the establishment of a means of social control of young black and brown men in particular. How conscious was that? How would you argue that it was a conscious decision to establish a successor, in a sense, to Jim Crow, and what came before Jim Crow?

There were mixed motives. One of the things that I laid out in the book was the history of the Southern strategy, the deliberate political strategy of divide and conquer, of using “get tough” racial appeals in order to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were fearful of and resentful of the progress that had been made by African-Americans since the civil-rights movement, who feared that they now had to compete for limited jobs in the era of deindustrialization with black folks. They were resentful of affirmative action.

Fearmongering and scapegoating was at the heart of the Southern strategy, which used racially coded and not so coded political appeals defining black and brown men in particular as the enemy, as criminals, as drug users, as superpredators, in order to appeal to poor and working-class white voters in the South and flip those blue states to red. That Southern strategy fuelled the “get tough” movement, helped to birth the war on drugs, and was in part about turning the clock back on racial progress to a time when white folks didn’t have to compete on equal terms with black and brown folks.

But it’s also the case that racial stereotypes are a result of really racist media portrayals of drug users during the crack epidemic, which created conscious as well as unconscious stereotypes in law enforcement and the public at large. This helped to fuel this notion that we should get tough on them, the racially defined Others.

So the drug war was in part a politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil-rights movement, but it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fuelled by media portrayals of drug users. Those racial stereotypes were resonant with the same stereotypes of slaves and folks during the Jim Crow era.

A lot of people think of mass incarceration and “get tough” policies as the result of right-wing politics. But in what ways have liberals also played a part in this history?

I view liberals as equally guilty of birthing the system of mass incarceration as right-wing conservatives. President Bill Clinton escalated the drug war that had been originally declared by President Richard Nixon and then escalated by Ronald Reagan. Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what many of his Republican predecessors ever dreamed. And he did so in part to prove that he could be tougher on them, the black criminals, than his Republican counterparts.

I think it must also be acknowledged that there were black politicians and black communities calling for tough responses to rising crime in inner-city communities that were suffering from economic collapse. But it’s important to draw a distinction between black politicians and black communities that were desperate for intervention as factories closed and disappeared, and work disappeared, as William Julius Wilson described so powerfully in his book “ When Work Disappears .” There was a period of time when hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished practically overnight in poor black communities, and they suffered depression and economic collapse. Crime rates rose and people were desperate for a meaningful, quick response.

But it would be wrong, in my view, to say that mass incarceration was supported by black communities. Black communities have organized for and demanded many large-scale interventions to address economic inequality, crime, educational inequality over the years. And it has only been in the area of crime that our nation has been willing to respond with massive investments in police, prisons, mass surveillance.

You were writing this book as Barack Obama was starting out his Presidency. Did his election make it harder for people to hear your argument at first? In fact, your book did not really take off the way it did for a little while.

Yes, that’s absolutely right. Many people think that “The New Jim Crow” was an instant best-seller.

But it took a couple of years, right?

Yes. People didn’t want to hear that we were still locked in a cycle of racial progress, backlash, retrenchment, and reformation of systems of racial and social control. It seemed much more likely that we were in an era of post-racialism, a time of color blindness, or at least on our way towards that Promised Land. I spent a couple of years on the road pretty much non-stop, speaking to small crowds and churches and groups of students and activists, really desperate to sound an alarm and to help people to see that, no, we are not free of our racial history. Our nation has, in fact, done it again. We have birthed a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world has ever seen. Millions of people have been relegated yet again to a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. It wasn’t a message people were eager to hear, but I think it is much easier to see today, ten years later, that our nation is not yet free of its racial history, and that we continue to create new systems of racial and social control.

Decades ago, politicians were promising to build prison walls and new prisons. Today, politicians are promising border walls and the same politics of divide and conquer, fearmongering, and scapegoating that helped to give rise to the “get tough” movement, and the war on drugs is being used to fuel anger and resentment towards immigrants and mass deportation and mass detention.

While you were writing this book, your husband was working as a federal prosecutor. Did you have disagreements on the ideas that you were laying out? How did you discuss this with somebody so close to you?

My husband and I kind of came to these issues from very different perspectives. I had been working for years as a civil-rights lawyer. When we got married, he decided to become a federal prosecutor. While we both shared a commitment to racial and social justice, it was very difficult for me to accept that he was working for justice on the inside. We definitely had different disagreements over the years. But I also found him to be a very helpful reader. He has always given insightful and useful feedback on my writing and has been incredibly supportive of my work over the years, and so I’m grateful for that. I think it has been helpful in many ways for me to be challenged in my thinking by someone who has seen through the eyes of law enforcement.

There’s been no shortage of books about race and mass incarceration. Why do you think it was your book that captured the public in the way that it did, and still does?

I think the book was published at the right time. Our nation was reeling from an economic crisis that was forcing former “get tough” true believers to take a hard look at the system of mass incarceration. Former governors who had been calling for harsh mandatory minimum sentences and had been fierce drug warriors were suddenly realizing that it was not possible to continue to expand this massive prison state without raising taxes on the predominantly white middle class. And so suddenly people were beginning to ask questions and to be open to the possibility that perhaps this race to incarcerate had been misguided.

At the same time, the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri , forced a conversation about race and our criminal-justice system that our nation had been determined to avoid for a very long time. The activism and the organizing and the passion and heartbreak that flowed from the killing of Trayvon Martin , the killing of Michael Brown , the deaths of Kalief Browder and Sandra Bland opened up a space where people began searching for answers regarding how we got to this place.

I know from your new preface to the tenth-anniversary edition that you got thousands of letters from people who wrote you about the book, many from people who were formerly incarcerated. What were they telling you?

Yeah, it has been overwhelming, over the years, to receive thousands of letters. I’m embarrassed and sad to say that I haven’t been able to read all of them. Some people have written just thanking me for the book and for speaking a truth that they may have been trying to speak in their own communities.

There’s also a lot of people writing me from prison, begging for help. Those are the most heartbreaking letters to read because, often, not only am I not able to help them but there’s no one who I can recommend who can. There is just not available legal support for people who are in prison trying to fight their charges or reduce their sentences.

In the preface you wrote for the tenth-anniversary edition, you kept coming back to this idea of “Everything and nothing has changed.” What’s changed, and what hasn’t? Are we better off now than we were a decade ago, when your book was first published?

Well, certainly, in some ways, on the surface, it appears that everything has changed. When my book was first published, President Obama had just been elected. It seemed that we were on the right path: still had a long way to go, but were headed in the right direction. At least, that was the sentiment that was shared by many, many people. It seemed as though this dream of a multiracial, multi-ethnic, egalitarian democracy was within our reach, and there was an incredible amount of hope for positive change. And yet we were also living in a time of tremendous denial.

As I wrote, a system of mass incarceration had been born in America, a system of racial and social control that turned back much of the racial progress we thought we had made, and people were unwilling to talk about it and to face it. Criminal-justice issues weren’t even really on the radar of civil-rights organizations at that time, with the exception of the A.C.L.U. and some work on racial profiling that was beginning to be done by the N.A.A.C.P. and other organizations. When the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, in 2008, sent out a letter listing the most pressing issues on civil rights, criminal-justice issues didn’t even make the list. And when, in 2009, the Congressional Black Caucus sent out a list of a couple dozen issues that might be of concern to black communities, criminal justice didn’t make the list. This was just as the drug war was raging and the race to incarcerate was going full bore. And so there was a way in which we were asleep and in denial.

Today, that has changed. The election of President Trump has completely decimated whatever fantasies we had that we are living in a post-racial America. We now can see that systems of racial and social control are alive and well, not only due to the uprisings in Ferguson and the many, many publicized police killings of unarmed black people and the growing movements to end mass incarceration. We’ve also come to see how yet another system of racial and social control has been born in this country, the system of mass deportation and mass detention. So we have this paradox in which, on the one hand, it seems that everything has changed, yet the politics of white supremacy have remained largely unchanged during the Obama years. Now we are forced to reckon with racial realities that we had long attempted to avoid, and I think we are finally beginning to see how the politics of divide and conquer, the politics of racial scapegoating and fearmongering, have been used again and again.

Some of the scholars who have been in dialogue with you about your book have taken issue with your focus on the war on drugs and nonviolent drug offenses. John Pfaff, in his book “ Locked In ,” says that only about sixteen per cent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges, and very few of them—maybe about five or six per cent of that group—are both low level and nonviolent. And what he and the other scholars are saying is, even if you released all the people in prisons who were there for drug offenses, nonviolent drug offenses, that would not put a real dent in the prison population.

Well, that’s absolutely right. It is true that roughly half of the people who are held in state prisons today have been convicted of offenses that are labelled violent, and that a small minority of people in prison today have been labelled drug offenders. But one of the main points of “The New Jim Crow” is that it is a profound mistake to think of the system of mass incarceration as simply a system of prisons.

There are twice as many people on probation or parole today as are locked in prisons or jails. When people think about the system of mass incarceration, they typically just think about who’s in prison at any given moment. But what I hope to draw people’s attention to is that this system of mass incarceration is actually a system of mass criminalization. It is a system that criminalizes people at very young ages, often before they’re old enough to vote. It labels them criminals and felons, and then strips them of basic civil rights, the very rights supposedly won in the civil-rights movement. And this happens even if you’ve been sentenced only to probation.

So when people look at prison statistics and say, Oh, well, most people who are in prison are there for violent offenses, so our primary concern must be violent crime, or they think, Oh, well, this prison system is really about responding to violent crime, they get it very wrong.

About five per cent of people who are arrested every year have been convicted of violent crimes or charged with violent crimes. People who have been convicted of violent offenses typically get much, much longer sentences than people who have been convicted of nonviolent crimes like drug offenses. And, therefore, they comprise a much larger portion of the prison population. However, ninety-five per cent of those who are arrested and swept into the criminal-justice system every year have been convicted of nonviolent crimes. And the largest category of arrests are drug arrests. That was true in 2010, and it’s true today.

The war on drugs has been a primary vehicle for sweeping people into a criminal-justice system, branding them criminals and felons, and then relegating them to a permanent second-class status for life. That doesn’t mean we should be unconcerned about violent crime or the harm that it does to communities, nor should we be unconcerned about the extremely long sentences and inhuman treatment that people often receive being caged. But what it does mean is that we have to stop thinking about the system of mass incarceration as simply a prison system.

Michelle, let’s talk about the cages in general. There have been calls in recent years for prison abolition. And I wonder what you make of the prison-abolition movement. I’ll ask you what Angela Davis asks in the title of her famous book from 2003, “ Are Prisons Obsolete? ”

I think prisons are absolutely obsolete. I hope that one day our nation will look back on this practice of putting human beings in literal cages, often treating them worse than we would treat a dog at the pound, sometimes locking them in solitary confinement for decades, allowing them little or no access to sunshine or human contact—I hope that one day we will look back on this practice with as much shame and horror as we view the practice of slavery, or the practice of cutting off limbs and hands of thieves. I hope that we find much more humane, constructive ways of responding to the real harms of violence and of crime than subjecting people to deliberate humiliation, stigmatization, suffering, and caging.

We can do better than this. In my experience, most folks understand that caging people and then stripping them of basic civil and human rights upon their release isn’t productive. In fact, it’s more likely to encourage criminal behavior in the future and make it more difficult for people to survive on the outside without resorting to crime. It’s likely to traumatize people in ways that will be harmful to themselves, to their families, and to their communities. Most people understand that when you talk about drug abuse or drug addiction. People understand that it is much more productive for people to get drug treatment rather than be in a cage. But when it comes to violence, people have a much more difficult time imagining that there are solutions beyond inflicting violence and caging people.

But I’m so encouraged by the work of restorative- and transformative-justice advocates today who are challenging us to think about ways of responding that are more humane and more effective, both for survivors as well as for those who have committed acts of violence.

What do you envision specifically as an alternative to cages, to prisons, to jails? Is there a place in the world that has a justice system that you can point to and say, We definitely should move toward something more like that ?

Well, there’s been a lot written in recent years about systems in Norway and Germany that are much more humane than the system of caging that we have in the United States. I would really encourage people to read Danielle Sered’s book “ Until We Reckon ,” specifically about a program that she operates in New York City called Common Justice. Common Justice is a restorative-justice program that provides alternatives to incarceration for people who have been convicted of or who are facing charges for violent offenses. And what’s interesting about what she has found in the program is that ninety per cent of survivors of violent crime, when given the option of participating in a restorative-justice program, or the opportunity to confront the person who has caused them harm and to devise a plan for that person to try to make up for what they have done in some way, choose to participate in a restorative-justice program rather than to pursue criminal charges and incarceration. This kind of flies in the face of the research that suggests that survivors of violent crime always want people locked up and the key thrown away. In fact, it turns out that survivors of violent crime and the people who have committed harm can come together in many cases, far more often than we imagine, and together develop fair solutions for responding to the harm that’s been caused.

One of the things that is standing in the way of such reform is the fact that a huge number of prisons—seventy per cent, in fact—are located in rural communities and go a long way in bolstering the economies of these communities. I mean, the fact is that prisons are a big source of income for many people living around them. And you make this very clear.

The profit motive is significant. And very often people think about the profit motive simply in terms of private prisons making money off of caging human beings. However, as the book “ Prison Profiteers ,” edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, points out, there is a very large range of corporate interests that make an enormous amount of money off of our prison system—everything from private health-care providers to Taser-gun manufacturers to companies that are now creating these electronic monitors, G.P.S. tracking systems for people when they are released from prison or jail.

E-carceration, you call it.

Yes. One of the things that worries me most today is the emergence of e-carceration, or digital prisons, as some activists refer to them. Many people are now being forced to wear electronic monitors, G.P.S. tracking devices, upon release from prisons and jails. These devices will limit people’s range of movement, confining them to their homes or to their neighborhoods, sometimes making it impossible for them to go to work or pick up their children from school. These tracking devices send off alarms to police departments if people travel out of their designated zones. In many ways, these tracking devices are creating entire neighborhoods that are under a kind of lockdown, as an electronically enforced kind of virtual concentration camp, where large percentages of the population are confined to small areas.

But what do you say to people who argue that these technological solutions are more humane than prisons and jails?

Well, certainly, most people, myself included, would rather have an electronic monitor, a G.P.S. tracking device, attached to my ankle than to be sitting in a literal cage. However, I find it very difficult to call a system of e-carceration and the emergence of digital prisons progress. Progress would be decriminalizing our communities, not subjecting them to new, high-tech forms of surveillance and control.

It is entirely possible that, in the years to come, as private corporations begin investing more and more money—billions of dollars are now being invested in the electronic surveillance of people who have been criminalized—that we will have entire communities and neighborhoods that are trapped in digital prisons. It will be cheaper to surveil and control millions of people electronically than through old-fashioned brick-and-mortar prisons.

So I don’t think we should celebrate the rise of electronic monitoring as a step in the right direction or progress. A step in the right direction would be massive investments in education, drug treatment, health care, and job creation, in trauma support in the communities that have been devastated by the war on drugs and mass incarceration.

We all know that the safest communities are not the ones that have the most police, the most prisons, or the highest percentage of people on electronic monitors under constant surveillance and control. No, what creates safety in our communities are good schools, plentiful jobs, quality health care, and a thriving social fabric.

The racial disparities in prisons over the last decade have actually declined. Is there any reason for hope in that?

It’s absolutely a positive development that racial disparities have declined to the extent that it means that we are relying less and less on criminalization and incarceration of all people, including people of color.

I worry about those who focus primarily on racial disparities in our criminal-justice system as a measure of injustice. In fact, there is some research that suggests that racial disparities have narrowed in part because more white people have been incarcerated or saddled with criminal records as a result of the opioid epidemic , or because, as some people have argued, many Latinos are being mislabelled as white in our criminal-justice system, distorting the data. But I wouldn’t celebrate that kind of progress. The goal here is not to subject people of all colors to unnecessary suffering. The goal ought to be to view and treat all people of all colors with dignity, humanity, compassion, and concern.

However, there is also significant evidence indicating that racial disparities have narrowed in large part because many states, New York included, have moved away from many of the harsh drug-war policies that resulted in enormous racial disparities in incarceration and conviction rates. And that is cause for celebration.

I think, again, we have to make sure that we’re not simply addressing symptoms rather than underlying causes. True progress depends on us caring and demonstrating care, compassion, and concern for poor people, and people of color, and being willing to invest in their well-being and their health and their education and their thriving rather than simply in their punishment and in their control.

All the front-runner candidates for the Democratic nomination support some form or another of criminal-justice reform. Do you have a favorite among them?

No, I am not endorsing anyone at this time.

But, on this issue, is there anybody who seems particularly advanced or to your liking?

Well, I would have to say that I have found Elizabeth Warren ’s and Bernie Sanders ’s criminal-justice platforms to be very encouraging. They’re taking a comprehensive approach to criminal-justice reform and not simply tinkering with the machine by promising to reduce sentencing, for example. Meaningful criminal-justice reform requires taking a very holistic view and insuring that people who are released from prison have meaningful opportunities for education and access to health care and drug treatment and mental-health treatment and support, and that there is a strong commitment to taking the profit motive out of incarceration entirely. And, you know, viewing criminal-justice reform through a racial-justice lens. So I am encouraged that virtually all of the Democratic candidates have stated a willingness to embrace criminal justice-reform to some degree. But for me, personally, I’m less interested in the reform of our criminal-justice system than its transformation. I think we must reimagine the meaning of justice in America, not simply reform our existing criminal-justice institutions. I think that work depends on building and organizing and the engagement of our communities. We can’t simply look to our politicians to have the answers

Finally, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you what seems to be a personal professional question. Your main teaching post has been at an institution that has religion and faith at its center, the Union Theological Seminary. Does that choice represent a change in your thinking on criminal justice or in your own life?

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. And it requires a reckoning, individually and collectively, with our racial history, our racial present, and our racial future. Many academics and lawyers are reluctant to face or engage in this reckoning, in part because it seems so big, so overwhelming. Lawyers are accustomed to defining problems in legal terms so that they can solve them. Academics want to study problems. Legal academics want to study problems in a very narrow and often data-driven way, without really asking the deeper questions around, Who are we in relationship to one another? What does justice mean?

And I have found, much to my surprise, that, in progressive seminaries like Union Theological Seminary, there is or there seems to be much greater enthusiasm for wrestling with those deep moral questions of the meaning of justice in a nation forged through genocide and slavery, a multiracial, multiethnic nation that is struggling to overcome its racial history. What does it mean to do justice in this context, in this moment in time?

And I jokingly, although it’s not so much of a joke, tell people who just say to me, “I want to go to law school,” I say, “Well, law school is a place where you learn the rules of the game and how to play it. But it isn’t a place where people think deeply about justice. And I can’t say that’s true for every law school, but it’s true for too many of them. And I’m just grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be affiliated with Union Theological Seminary, which has such a long history of taking questions of justice very seriously and approaching them not just from a legal or political perspective but from a deeply moral one.

Does this mean that religion and faith-based traditions have become more in the center of your thinking and research and writing and your own personal evolution?

Yes, absolutely, although I don’t consider myself a religious person. I’m probably more of a spiritual but not religious person. But, yeah, I think, ultimately, these questions are about: What does it mean to be in the right relationship to one another? Who belongs in a community, in a nation? How should we treat the least advantaged? What do we owe to one another? How do we repair harm? What does it mean to face irreparable harm in a constructive and responsible way?

Are these questions at the center of a next book?

Yes, they are. I’m working on a book that is very different from “The New Jim Crow.” It’s much more personal, and it’s about my journey going from a liberal civil-rights lawyer who was tinkering with the machine, and believed that we could somehow get to the Promised Land if we just filed the next best lawsuit, or met with the governor, or organize the right number of people for the next protest, to someone who now believes that much more revolutionary change is required, and it’s not simply a political revolution. A moral and spiritual revolution is also required of us now.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By The New Yorker

By Neal Katyal

The New Jim Crow

64 pages • 2 hours read

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

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander . The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues to appear on countless racial justice reading lists and was named one of the most influential books of the past 20 years by the Chronicle of Higher Education . This study guide refers to the 10th anniversary edition published in 2020 by the New Press.

Between the 1870s and 1960s, legal segregation, racially targeted voting laws, and a host of other political, legal, and cultural forces effectively transformed Black men and women living in the American South into second-class citizens—or, as Alexander puts it, members of a “racial undercaste” (129). This period of American history is known as the Jim Crow era. While civil rights legislation in the 1960s eliminated this specific form of oppression and disenfranchisement, a new form of racialized social control emerged in the 1980s: mass incarceration. With the launch of the War on Drugs and a series of draconian crime bills, the number of incarcerated Americans skyrocketed in less than three decades from 300,000 to over 2 million, most of them for drug convictions and most of them Black men. This transpired even though white and Black Americans sell and use drugs at roughly the same rates. Far from being an effective system of crime deterrence, Alexander argues that mass incarceration increases violent crime. Given that the United States declared the War on Drugs before Americans even perceived drug use to be a serious problem, this leads Alexander to conclude that mass incarceration was designed as a system of racial control rather than an effort to combat violent crime.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,650+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,850+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

In Chapter 1 Alexander details the history of “racialized social control” (20). From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, she identifies a persistent pattern by which systems of racial subjugation are built, maintained, dismantled, and finally transformed to fit the circumstances of a given era. In the case of mass incarceration, politicians like Ronald Reagan built the system to fit into a new post-Civil Rights Movement paradigm that prohibited politicians from making overtly racist appeals to American voters. In this new era of supposed colorblindness, Reagan—and later George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton—utilized “law and order” (50) rhetoric that implicitly demonized Black men as predators. In the middle of Reagan’s presidency, crack cocaine swept through urban communities of color, giving “tough on crime” advocates the perfect pretext to launch an aggressive drug enforcement campaign against Black American males.

In Chapter 2 Alexander explains exactly how the new racial caste system works, beginning with its point of entry: the police. Empowered by Supreme Court decisions that effectively gutted the Fourth Amendment, police officers may stop and search individuals under the faintest pretexts of probable cause. Yet just because police departments can target millions of Americans suspected of possessing small amounts of drugs, the question remains of why they choose to divert time and resources away from addressing more serious crimes like murders and rapes. Alexander points to huge financial incentives offered by the federal government to encourage widespread enforcement of minor drug infractions. Massive federal cash grants and changes to civil asset forfeiture laws have made participation in the drug war extraordinarily lucrative for state and local police departments.

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 175 + new titles every month

In the following chapter Alexander explores why, in many states, Black Americans make up as much as 80% to 90% of individuals who serve time in prison on drug charges, even though the system is formally colorblind and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates. Unlike in the case of robberies or assaults, where clear victims exist, those involved with drug transactions are unlikely to report them to the police because doing so would implicate themselves in a crime. As a result, police must be proactive in addressing drug crime and are therefore afforded an enormous amount of discretion concerning whom to target. As for why police departments choose to disproportionately target people of color, Alexander blames both implicit biases and pervasive media and political campaigns that frame Black men as criminals in the American imagination. Prosecutors are also granted an outsized amount of discretion thanks to the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals. With such harsh sentences hanging over the heads of those charged with drug crimes, prosecutors are better empowered to extract plea deals. While these plea deals may keep an individual out of jail, they also frequently result in a felony record, saddling that person for life with what Alexander calls “the prison label” (189).

The consequences of this prison label are the focus of Chapter 4. When an individual leaves prison or accepts a felony plea deal, they face legal discrimination in employment, housing, welfare benefits, and often voting rights. It is here that Alexander observes the strongest similarities between mass incarceration and the Jim Crow era, given that Black Americans faced these same forms of discrimination during the first half of the 20th century in the South. She also addresses the stigma felt by everyone touched by the criminal justice system, which includes the formerly incarcerated, their families, and any individual who can expect daily harassment from police officers.

The following chapter outlines the specific similarities and differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Aside from the legal discrimination in both systems, Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political roots. Both systems gained political support from elites who sought to exploit the economic and cultural fears of poor and working-class whites. Both operate by defining what it means to be Black in America in the cultural imagination—in the case of mass incarceration, that means defining Black men as criminals. Perhaps the most significant and frightening difference is that while both slavery and Jim Crow were systems of labor exploitation, mass incarceration involves marginalization and removal from society. Alexander points out that similar racially based marginalization efforts were precursors to genocides in the 20th century.

The final chapter attempts to chart a way forward for civil rights lawyers, activists, and community members. Alexander maintains that it is crucial for any reform movement to acknowledge the role played by race in mass incarceration. Otherwise, she argues, another racial caste system will emerge to replace it, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow, and Jim Crow replaced slavery.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Featured Collections

A Black Lives Matter Reading List

View Collection

African American Literature

Black History Month Reads

Books on Justice & Injustice

Contemporary Books on Social Justice

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

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

2011, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

The New Jim Crow

By michelle alexander.

• The New Jim Crow Summary

Alexander begins her work by explaining that she came to write it due to her experiences working for the ACLU out of Oakland; there she saw not only the racial bias in the criminal justice system but how the system itself was constructed in a way to render people of color second-class citizens much in the way Jim Crow laws of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did. Those in prison and the ex-offenders released are marginalized politically, economically, and socially, forming a new racial undercaste.

Alexander details the history of race in America, moving from slavery to the Civil War to Reconstruction to the Jim Crow laws to the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement garnered an intense backlash that conservative politicians yoked in order to gain votes and implement a new, albeit subtler, racial separation. In the 1980s, Reagan began the War on Drugs not based on correct statistics about drug use (people of all races use, buy, and sell drugs at about the same rate) but in order to appease whites. “Law and order” rhetoric became de rigeur even amongst liberal politicians; no one wanted to be soft on crime, especially when the media blasted sensational stories about “crack whores” all over the papers and televisions. Even Clinton was responsible for some of the harshest anti-drug laws that harmed black communities already suffering from economic collapse.

Mass incarceration is the gateway to the New Jim Crow, Alexander’s concept for understanding how black people in particular lack any real rights of citizenship. Law enforcement has almost carte blanche to stop people in cars and in the streets all the while claiming it is not for racist reasons. While statistics show that racial profiling does exist and does not reflect actual crime rates, it continues unabated. Law enforcement was given many incentives in order to carry out these stops, such as federal funding, training, and the ability to keep seized cash and assets.

Those arrested for drugs rarely get the nice, neat trial seen on television or in movies. Most poor arrestees cannot afford a decent lawyer. Mandatory minimums in sentencing lead to absurdly disproportionate sentences. Probation and parole are almost impossible to adhere to, leading most offenders back to jail.

The official colorblindness of the laws and of Supreme Court rulings facilitate this system. The punishments are often high because while jury selection is also supposed to be colorblind, it is pervaded by implicit racism in terms of whom the lawyers choose for their jury members.

When a person is released from jail, society certainly does not seem to consider their debt paid because they will immediately enter a harsh and inflexible society bent on keeping them subservient and marginalized. Most felons cannot get public housing and they cannot vote. Most are not eligible for public assistance like food stamps. Most have trouble finding work because “checking the box” is tantamount to not even bothering to apply. Furthermore, the shame and stigma attached to being a felon are psychologically oppressive.

With all of the very clear data on what is happening, it seems like more Americans should be at least bothered by what is going on. Unfortunately, denial and willful ignorance make most Americans blind to this reality. Changing things would be incredibly difficult, and the language of colorblindness makes people doubt there is anything truly serious going on anyway. Decades (if not centuries) of stereotypes, savvy political exploitation, and media embellishment or obfuscation have contributed to this sorry state of affairs.

Alexander makes sure to clarify that she does not think the similarities between Jim Crow and the New Crow are absolute; there are several differences, although they are not as stark as one might initially think. The similarities include the exploitation of white resentment; colorblind language and laws; disenfranchisement and exclusion from juries; racial segregation of neighborhoods; closing of the courts; legalized discrimination; and the definition of race itself. Differences include the lack of outrage and activism today and less overt racism and violence today.

Many African Americans embrace an “uplift” ideology or try to operate within the system, but even the best behaved find it impossible to meet the absurd standards of white America. Alexander exhorts us to be compassionate and rational in the way we treat our fellow human beings.

In the final chapter, Alexander discusses why civil rights organizations today do not focus on mass incarceration, explaining that they prefer to work on affirmative action and do not concern themselves with this moral, rather than legal, issue. Affirmative action is not even worthy of working on because it is not real change; it is only cosmetic.

The point of the book is not to provide detailed methods to “solve” this crisis, but Alexander does lay out several of the things that will need to be changed: the private prison system, law enforcement profiling and incentives, and our public consciousness. It will be overwhelmingly hard but the conversation must be had and the changes must be made. No one likes to talk about race but it is the only way we can ever move beyond the specious colorblind rhetoric we currently have to a real, equitable future.

The New Jim Crow Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The New Jim Crow is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Find two examples where Alexander introduces the views of others.

Alexander introduces the views of other by including examples of African Americans who were refused the right to vote, or in turn, were faced with barriers to voting such as “poll taxes” or “literacy tests."

2. Explain the closed door metaphor.

Alexander often says things like, "It closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias in sentencing" (111). The metaphor of closed doors is apt because while doors may literally be closed in terms of suits not able to proceed, the image of a...

What central research question does Alexander ask that politicians and scholars have not been able to answer

The main theme of Alexander's work is that the current American system of mass incarceration, created in response to the rise in drug arrests, is a systematic attempt to marginalize people of color much in the same way that the Jim Crow laws...

Study Guide for The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow study guide contains a biography of Michelle Alexander, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The New Jim Crow
• Character List

Essays for The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

• Structure and Rhetorical Strategy in "The New Jim Crow"
• Rigorous Reasoning
• Mandated Failures
• What Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" Adds to “If Beale Street Could Talk”
• Mass Incarceration Parallels with Jim Crow

Lesson Plan for The New Jim Crow

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The New Jim Crow
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The New Jim Crow Bibliography

Faculty Publications: Critique of the New Jim Crow

In a recent NYU Law Review article , Professor  James Forman  examines the claim that mass incarceration policies constitute a new form of Jim Crow. He finds that although the New Jim Crow analogy sheds light on the often-hidden injustices of criminal justice policies, the analogy oversimplifies the origins of mass incarceration and limits the effectiveness of efforts to challenge it.    

Prof. Forman agrees with proponents of the New Jim Crow that mass incarceration policies present a profound social crisis. Low income and undereducated African Americans are incarcerated at unprecedented levels. Race-neutral criminal justice policies unfairly target black communities and permanently diminish the opportunities of convicted offenders. (See Part II of the article ).

However, Prof. Forman questions the usefulness of the analogy which, he argues, leads to a distorted view of mass incarceration by: failing to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment; focusing on the War on Drugs and neglecting violent crime; and drawing attention away from the harms that mass incarceration has on the most disadvantaged groups. He also warns that in seeking to find parallels between the Old Jim Crow and mass incarceration, scholars risk overlooking other terrible aspects of the Old Jim Crow. Finding common ground with the New Jim Crow writers, Forman concludes his piece with a few suggestions for opponents of mass incarceration to scale back the prison population and reduce its damaging effects.  

Further Reading:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). 

Franklin E. Zimring, The City that Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (2012).

Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository collection of Prof. Forman's work

Related News

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander

In the worst of America’s Jim Crow era, Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois found inspiration and hope in national parks

Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Religious History, Rhodes College

Disclosure statement

Thomas S. Bremer has conducted historical research for the National Park Service as a consultant at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Illinois.

View all partners

In his collection of essays and poems published in 1920 titled “ Darkwater ,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about his poignant encounter with the beauty of the Grand Canyon , the stupendous chasm in Arizona.

As he stood at the canyon’s rim, the towering intellectual and civil rights activist described the sight that spread before his eyes. The Grand Canyon’s “grandeur is too serene – its beauty too divine!” Du Bois wrote . “Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak! No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow, only the eye of God has looked.”

But Du Bois’ experience undermined a widely held assumption that was reinforced by early conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt – that only white people could appreciate the landscapes of national parks. For Roosevelt and his progressive allies, saving nature was connected to saving the white race.

My research on the history of national parks shows that these racial assumptions and federal policies contributed to making the parks unwelcome places for Black nature enthusiasts such as Du Bois.

Du Bois traveled to national parks anyway, and he understood that most other Black people were unable to follow because of the cost and discrimination found at every turn. It still bothered Du Bois, however, that Black people were unable to experience a joy similar to what he found at what would later become Acadia National Park in Maine.

“Why do not those who are scarred in the world’s battle and hurt by its hardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the utter joy of life?” Du Bois asked .

The progressive politics of racial purity

President Theodore Roosevelt has been recognized as a “ wilderness warrior ” for his unprecedented protection of lands and wildlife. But his conservation record was tied to the belief of white racial superiority that was embodied in eugenics , the racist pseudoscience of the early 20th century that tried to determine who was fit or unfit to have children.

One initiative of the Roosevelt administration was the creation of the National Conservation Commission on June 8, 1908. Though Congress eliminated the commission’s budget after six months, its task was to take an inventory of all the nation’s natural resources and make recommendations on how best to protect them.

Gifford Pinchot , the president’s most trusted environmental adviser, served as the commission’s executive chairman and compiled its final report in February 1909.

It offered 10 far-reaching recommendations on topics as diverse as public health to labor regulation and the elimination of poverty and crime. The 10th recommendation advocated for “eugenics, or hygiene for future generations” that connected federal conservation to white supremacy.

Pinchot’s report called for the forced sterilization of “degenerates generally” – namely, most immigrants, Black and Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities. It also sought to increase the breeding of what they believed to be racially superior races, such as white Anglo Saxons and people of Scandinavian heritage.

“The problem of the conservation of our natural resources is therefore not a series of independent problems, but a coherent, all-embracing whole,” the report concluded. “If our nation cares to make any provision for its grandchildren and its grandchildren’s grandchildren, this provision must include conservation in all its branches – but above all, the conservation of the racial stock itself.”

Another of Roosevelt’s close associates took an even more pointed approach to white supremacy and conservation.

Madison Grant had worked with Roosevelt since the 1890s and was an avid conservationist. He was also the author of an influential book on eugenics, “ The Passing of the Great Race ,” a racist tome arguing the superiority of what he called the “Nordic race.”

New agency, same philosophy

The election in 1912 of President Woodrow Wilson saw the implementation of discriminatory policies .

According to historian Eric S. Yellin , Wilson’s administration was “loaded with white supremacists” who effectively enacted harsh anti-Black policies in the federal government.

In 1913, for instance, Wilson ordered the federal workforce to be racially segregated, first at the U.S. Post Office, where most Black federal employees worked, and then at the Treasury Department, which had the second-largest number of Black workers.

The Wilson administration also created the National Park Service , the federal agency in charge of managing and interpreting the country’s national parks, when Wilson signed the Organic Act in 1916.

Not surprisingly, this new park service had the same racial policies of the Wilson administration and abided by local laws on racial segregation. That meant Black nature enthusiasts would continue to be prohibited in national parks in most of the former Confederate South.

My research has shown that the National Park Service catered exclusively to the expectations and needs of white visitors and it had very few Black employees or visitors. The policies included racially segregated dining rooms, picnic grounds and restrooms. Maps and signs in some parks directed Black visitors away from whites and to designated Black sections of the parks.

The official policy didn’t end until 1945, when U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes outlawed segregation at national parks. But local segregation remained in practice in most Southern states for decades and still excluded Black visitors.

National parks as worth the struggle

Du Bois was willing to endure the racist laws that made traveling unpleasant for Black people seeking to find joy in natural beauty.

“Did you ever see a ‘Jim-Crow’ waiting-room?” Du Bois wrote in “Darkwater,” referring to the system of laws and social customs that disenfranchised Black people.

“Usually there is no heat in winter and no air in summer. To buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the ‘other window’ is waited on,” he explained. “Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets and money are over there.”

For Du Bois, the struggle was worth the experience of the Grand Canyon.

“There can be nothing like it,” Du Bois wrote. “It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad… It is human – some mighty drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown.”

The sight of the Grand Canyon, Du Bois concluded, “will live eternal in my soul.”

The same view has had the same effect on generations of visitors – Black, white and of countless other backgrounds – ever since.

• Environmentalism
• Civil rights
• Woodrow Wilson
• Theodore Roosevelt
• National Park Service
• Conservationists
• W.E.B. DuBois

Case Management Specialist

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer - Marketing

Assistant Editor - 1 year cadetship

Executive Dean, Faculty of Health

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, Earth System Science (School of Science)

National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Plan Your Visit
• Group Visits
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Accessibility Options
• Sweet Home Café
• Museum Store
• Museum Maps
• Our Mobile App
• Search the Collection
• Initiatives
• Museum Centers
• Publications
• Digital Resource Guide
• The Searchable Museum
• Exhibitions
• Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal
• Early Childhood
• Talking About Race
• Digital Learning
• Strategic Partnerships
• Ways to Give
• Internships & Fellowships
• Today at the Museum
• Upcoming Events
• Ongoing Tours & Activities
• Past Events
• Host an Event at NMAAHC
• About the Museum
• The Building
• Meet Our Curators
• Founding Donors
• Corporate Leadership Councils
• NMAAHC Annual Reports

The Historical Legacy of the Divine Nine

Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) emerged during a period that is characterized as a low point in American race relations. These associations were established on the principles of personal excellence, racial uplift, community service, civic action and kinship. Their emergence coincided with significant national developments, including the rise of Jim Crow laws, the popularity of scientific racism, and widespread racial violence and prejudice.

Black students, whether studying at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or predominantly white institutions, came together to create these organizations, forging familial ties to one another and outreach within the larger Black community. Those kinships and ties endure to this day. BGLOs formed at a time when Greek life at predominantly white institutions excluded Black students. 

Today, the nine BGLOs that comprise the National Pan-Hellenic Council, known as the Divine Nine, have an impact on community service and civic engagement, through outreach programs that include literacy, professional development and voter registration.   

Alpha Phi Alpha

Alpha Phi Alpha stands as the sole Black Greek-letter organization founded at an Ivy League institution—Cornell University. Amidst a campus marked by segregation and social isolation for Black students, a troublingly low retention rate prompted the remaining individuals to form a support and study group. 

On December 4, 1906, seven young Black men, aspiring to foster a brotherhood, laid the foundation for the fraternity. Their founding principles encompassed personal excellence, kinship, racial uplift via community service, civic engagement and philanthropy. Operating without precedent for Black students on campus, they forged an organization using secret societies as a support framework. 

An index card of dues paid by Thurgood Marshall's to Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Referred to as the "Seven Jewels of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” this group of founders included the influential intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The fraternity expanded, establishing a second chapter at Howard University. Its official journal, The Sphinx, served as a means to connect chapters, share information on business and social activities, and publish essays on contemporary issues. The fraternity also organized annual conventions to bridge communication gaps. 

During an era when most Black teenagers did not graduate high school or pursue college education, Alpha Phi Alpha intervened. It devised programs offering tutoring, financial aid, and heightened educational opportunities for Black youth. Notably, it initiated a national community service agenda, featuring initiatives such as the Go-To-High School, Go-To-College program and the Voting Rights Program, which engaged in voter registration drives.

Alpha Phi Alpha 33rd Convention Program. The program contains photos, an agenda, and advertisements all related to the 33rd Alpha Phi Alpha Conference held in Tulsa, OK. 

Alpha Phi Alpha’s dedication to community service became reflective of numerous other Black Greek-letter organizations emerging throughout the twentieth century’s early and latter halves. 

Alpha Kappa Alpha

Established on January 15, 1908, at Howard University, Alpha Kappa Alpha emerged as the first Greek-letter organization founded by Black college women. Ethel Hedgeman Lyle, a Howard student, aspired to create a supportive network for women sharing similar goals—to uplift one another and leverage their talents for the greater good. Collaborating with several other women, Lyle initiated the drafting of a constitution and finalized the official name, motto and colors. Unlike prior challenges with campus administrators, the group’s acceptance as a recognized campus organization encountered no delays, leading to the group's official formation in 1908.

Flag for Alpha Kappa Alpha 

The subsequent year marked the beginning of a tradition within the organization—the planting of Ivy, symbolizing the sorority's aims and ideals. This practice unfolded across various locations on campus, eventually culminating in the Ivy Leaf becoming a significant symbol. New chapters continued to sprout from 1913 onwards, a trend that persisted well into the present day. 

Member badge for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority

On the activism front, the founders assumed leadership roles within the YWCA and engaged in activities within the campus chapter of the NAACP. Additionally, the group aided Southern migrants in adapting to Northern life during the Great Migration. It advocated for women's suffrage, and the sorority also dedicated efforts to dressing dolls for underprivileged children at the Freedman’s Hospital. Notably, it established funds catering to students in need and those aspiring to pursue studies abroad. 

Alpha Kappa Alpha jacket worn during the Women's March on Washington

Kappa Alpha Psi

This black and white photograph depicts members of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity in front of the Alpha Chapter house during the North Central Province regional meeting.

Most Black Greek-letter fraternities trace their origins to Howard University. However, Kappa Alpha Psi is one of a few BGLOs that emerged among Black students at predominantly white universities.  Elder Watson Diggs and Byron Kenneth Armstrong, who had forged a friendship at Howard, found themselves at Indiana University, where they confronted the stark realities of Black life. Discrimination, inadequate social services and meager representation left Black students socially isolated within a campus environment. They were denied access to recreational and entertainment facilities. 

Diggs rallied nine fellow Black men and established Alpha Omega as an interim fraternity, a precursor to a permanent organization. On January 5, 1911, this group birthed a new fraternity on campus, called Kappa Alpha Nu, which attained national recognition on May 15, 1911. 

A wooden, Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity cane wrapped in red plastic tape and decorated with white stripe and white and red stripe decals wrapped along the body of the cane, forming red, diamond shapes.

Similar to other fraternities, this collective crafted a constitution, rituals, an initiation ceremony and a coat of arms. Their activities extended to hosting social events and annual “house parties” that drew Black students from across the state. By 1914, they officially adopted the name Kappa Alpha Psi. It expanded to multiple campuses and inaugurated a monthly publication in 1921 called the Kappa Alpha Psi Journal. Its initiatives included programs aiding high school students, and some members, notably Ralph Abernathy and Tom Bradley, emerged as prominent figures in the civil rights movement. 

Omega Psi Phi

With the formation of the first Black fraternity in 1906 at Cornell University, three students wanted to create something that Howard University could have of its own. At Howard, three students - Edgar Love, Frank Coleman, and Oscar Cooper - along with the assistance of biology Professor Ernest Just, established a new fraternity called Omega Psi Phi on November 17, 1911.

Miniature Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Paddle

Initially, Howard University administrators opposed the formation of this group, reflecting the attitudes of many colleges nationwide, which were concerned that secret societies could erode trust among students and lead to immoral behavior. Initially denied recognition by the university, Omega Psi Phi members initiated a public relations campaign by placing index cards around the campus on trees, fences, bulletin boards and other visible locations.  

President Wilbur P. Thirkield publicly denied the existence of Omega Psi Phi on campus, prompting members to personally lobby the faculty. After negotiations with the faculty, Omega Psi Phi transitioned from a local fraternity to a nationally recognized organization and was officially incorporated in 1924. Its chapters expanded across the country after World War I. In 1918, there were three chapters, and by 1923, there were 47 active chapters.

Ring of the Grand Basileus of Omega Psi Phi fraternity with storage pouch 

In 1926, Omega Psi Phi became a life member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, a group founded by member Carter G. Woodson, a historian and founder of Negro history week which later became Black History Month.  

During the Great Depression, the fraternity supported lawyer and civil rights activist John P. Davis, chairman of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, a coalition of 20 civil rights groups, in his efforts to secure fair employment for Black people. The fraternity also contributed to organizations such as the Southern Negro Congress, the National Urban League, the International Brotherhood of Red Caps and held a life membership with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Omega Psi Phi Colonel Charles E. Young Service medal and bracelet 

Delta Sigma Theta

Delta Sigma Theta emerged from a division within Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) as members expressed dissatisfaction with the organization's limited focus on campus affairs. Some members wanted to pivot towards addressing broader issues like public service and women's advancement. This desire to reform extended to establishing a national organization and altering the society's activities, accompanied by a name change that reflected their purpose. They also aimed to modify symbols, colors and adopt a more politically-oriented stance. 

Quilt with the Delta Sigma Theta logo 

In 1912, at Howard University, these members voted to transition from AKA to Delta Sigma Theta. The move sparked discord between graduate members, who favored maintaining the status quo, and new Alpha chapter members advocating for change. When a deadline imposed by a graduate member to cease reorganization efforts was ignored, 22 women parted ways from AKA and established Delta Sigma Theta on January 13, 1913. 

The turning point arrived in January 1930 when the organization’s Grand Chapter attained national incorporation. This action marked the Deltas as the first sorority predominantly composed of undergraduates to petition any university trustee to become an incorporated entity. 

A gold-toned gavel used by the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority

The organization became active politically. In 1913, Delta members marched side by side with white women in the 1913 Women’s Suffragette March, which featured 10,000 participants. It lobbied the federal government on various matters, including standing against injustice, particularly in the Scottsboro Boys case, anti-lynching laws and U.S. involvement in in Haiti. 

It also sponsored various social programs for Black people. It created the National Library Project in 1937, which sought to bring literacy to a population with limited resources. Furthermore, it created one of the nation’s first bookmobiles, where it filled busses with books and traveled to various areas in the American South. It served Black people in some of the most isolated parts of the country. 

Presently, the group boasts a membership exceeding 300,000 initiates and boasts over 1,000 chartered chapters worldwide. Its sisterhood predominantly comprises of Black college-educated women. Some of its notable members include former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and civil rights activist Dorothy Height. 

Phi Beta Sigma

While Phi Beta Sigma originated at Howard University, its conception sprouted in Memphis, Tennessee. In the summer of 1910, A. Langston Taylor, a high school student, encountered a Howard alum who not only regaled him with tales of campus life, but also shared insights about Greek fraternities. This encounter seeded the idea of forming a new organization. Taylor, along with his former college roommate Leonard Morse and fellow Howard student Charles I. Brown, convened to establish the official organization in a Washington, D.C. YMCA, with Taylor assuming the inaugural role of national president. It took university deans three months to grant recognition to this nascent fraternity, which was founded on January 9, 1914.

During the 1920s, Phi Beta Sigma actively engaged in advocacy efforts, notably supporting anti-lynching legislation. Moreover, it launched the Bigger and Better Business national program, aiming to address the imperative for Black economic empowerment. On the global stage, the fraternity opposed U.S. military intervention in Haiti, marking its involvement in international affairs. During this period, Sigma grew to have 45 chapters in 25 different cities. 

Phi Beta Sigma fraternity pin from the Epsilon Alpha Chapter at Dillard University, New Orleans

Notable Sigma brothers went on to make a significant impact in the Harlem Renaissance. Rhodes scholar and writer Alain Locke produced "The New Negro" in 1925, an anthology that featured fiction, poetry, and essays on Black art and literature. Another notable Sigma member during this period, musician James Weldon Johnson, authored "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing," also known as “The Negro National Anthem.”

The Great Depression represented a nadir in recruitment. Some members had to leave schools and some chapters became inactive. The Sigma treasury became low on funds. Yet, the economic downturn allowed the organization to assist other chapters. It provided scholarships for financially struggling members and chapters, even though it rarely was enough at times. 

Today, Phi Beta Sigma is an international organization, with nearly 600 chapters and 225,000 members since its founding in 1914. 

Phi Beta Sigma cardigan sweater from the Alpha Epsilon Chapter at Johnson C. Smith University

Zeta Phi Beta

Charles Taylor, a member of Phi Beta Sigma, approached Howard student Arizona Cleaver about her interest in forming a sister organization. Despite the presence of two sororities on Howard's campus, Cleaver believed there was room for another one. Following discussions, a meeting convened with 14 individuals, resulting in five members venturing to establish a new organization. Zeta Phi Beta swiftly obtained approval for Howard, marking the campus’ third Black sorority on January 16, 1920.

The founders promptly crafted a constitution mirroring Phi Beta Sigma’s structure, marking the birth of the first brother-sister organization. This constitution emphasized advancing education among college women, fostering uplifting projects, embodying the spirit of sisterly love, and promoting the ideals of finer womanhood. 

Pennant for the Zeta Phi Beta sorority's 45th Boulé 

Expanding beyond Howard, Zeta Phi Beta established chapters in New York City and Atlanta. It began a publication called Archon, initially titled X-Ray, and instituted the tradition of Finer Womanhood Week. The organization aligned itself with the NAACP and the National Negro Congress. Notably, Zeta embarked on the Zeta Housing Project of 1943, identifying housing vacancies and registering them with the National Housing Association. Many of these homes sheltered numerous war workers during World War II. 

Zeta Phi Beta members photographed on the campus of Claflin University

Sigma Gamma Rho

Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., was founded on November 12, 1922, at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, by seven educators: Mary Lou Allison Gardner Little, Dorothy Hanley Whiteside, Vivian White Marbury, Nannie Mae Gahn Johnson, Hattie Mae Annette Dulin Redford, Bessie Mae Downey Rhoades Martin and Cubena McClure. 

Sigma Gamma Rho's Sorority plot at Fisk University

In the 1920s, Indiana was a hostile climate for Black people, with the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan fueled by the 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation." Indiana was a hub of Klan activity, with over 250,000 Klansmen in the state, including individuals in powerful political positions. In fact, the Grand Dragon of the Klan lived half a block away from the Butler University campus.  

The university originally accepted Black students in its inaugural year of 1855, but in 1927, it established a quota system by admitting only 10 Black students annually. Sigma Gamma Rho still managed to thrive in this environment. The organization held its first national convention in 1925 and was nationally incorporated in 1929. It actively supported civil rights and worked to empower families in areas such as education and health. 

Customized Sigma Gamma Rho Converse sneakers for member MC Lyte 

During the Great Depression, the sorority organized literary contests to provide books to young Black students and established the National Vocational Guidance program to help them launch their careers. They also created the Sigma Gamma Rho Employment Aid Bureau to assist members in finding employment. In the war years, they established Sigma Teen Town to address juvenile delinquency, as societal concerns about absent fathers, stirred by the war, and mothers working in local factories, loomed large. 

Members of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority during a Founders Day celebration, Baltimore, Maryland, November 13, 1993

During the civil rights era, members of both organizations actively participated in public demonstrations and supported civil rights organizations. As of 2021, both groups continue to thrive, with Sigma Gamma Rho boasting over 500 chapters and Omega Psi Phi having over 700 chapters. 

Iota Phi Theta

Iota Phi Theta was established on September 19, 1963, at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, marking the final addition to the National Pan-Hellenic Council. Founded amidst the civil rights movement by twelve men, most of whom were non-traditional students, the group dedicated itself to social service. These founding members had long friendships and associations, However, due to their advanced ages, recruiting undergraduates as members posed a challenge. 

Letterman sweater for Iota Phi Theta Fraternity 

Aligned with the civil rights ethos, its members actively supported the boycott of a segregated shopping mall in Baltimore and collaborated on community service projects with organizations such as the NAACP, United Negro College Funds and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. 

In 1967, the group expanded its outreach through the Pied Pipers. Over time, membership surged, and by the early 1980s, it extended its presence to the West Coast, inaugurating a chapter at San Francisco State University in 1983. In 1993, it established the National Iota Foundation, which granted scholarships, funding and spearheaded the annual Iota Black College Tour. 

Founders paddle for Iota Phi Theta fraternity at Morgan State College 

Despite its later inception compared to other Black fraternities and sororities, Iota Phi Theta boasts notable members such as Bobby L. Rush, Dr. J. Keith Motley, Elvin Hayes, T.C. Carson and others. 

Black Letter Greek Organizations Homepages

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.

Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.

Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.

Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc.

References: 

“Iota Phi Theta,” 125th Anniversary of UMES, University of Maryland Easter Shore. https://wwwcp.umes.edu/125/iota-phi-theta/   

Ross Jr., Lawrence C. The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2000. 

Parks, Gregory S. and Stefan M. Bradley, Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, the Demands of Transcendence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 

Resurgence of the KKK in Indiana,” Digital Civil Rights Museum, accessed October 16, 2023, https://www.digitalresearch.bsu.edu/digitalcivilrightsmuseum/items/show/112  

“Sigma Gamma Rho,” 125th Anniversary of UMES, University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

By Steven Hahn

Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”

In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” Mr. Trump told Time, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Further evidence, it seems, of Mr. Trump’s efforts to construct a political world like no other in American history. But how unprecedented is it, really? That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.

Many of us have not wanted to see it that way. “This is not who we are as a nation,” one journalist exclaimed in what was a common response to the violence on Jan. 6, “and we must not let ourselves or others believe otherwise.” Mr. Biden has said much the same thing.

While it’s true that Mr. Trump was the first president to lose an election and attempt to stay in power, observers have come to recognize the need for a lengthier view of Trumpism. Even so, they are prone to imagining that there was a time not all that long ago when political “normalcy” prevailed. What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view.

Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.

A few examples may be illustrative. Although European colonization of North America has often been imagined as a sharp break from the ways of home countries, neo-feudal dreams inspired the making of Euro-American societies from the Carolinas up through the Hudson Valley, based as they were on landed estates and coerced labor, while the Puritan towns of New England, with their own hierarchies, demanded submission to the faith and harshly policed their members and potential intruders alike. The backcountry began to fill up with land-hungry settlers who generally formed ethnicity-based enclaves, eyed outsiders with suspicion and, with rare exceptions, hoped to rid their territory of Native peoples. Most of those who arrived in North America between the early 17th century and the time of the American Revolution were either enslaved or in servitude, and master-servant jurisprudence shaped labor relations well after slavery was abolished, a phenomenon that has been described as “belated feudalism.”

The anti-colonialism of the American Revolution was accompanied not only by warfare against Native peoples and rewards for enslavers, but also by a deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism, and hostility to Catholics remained a potent political force well into the 20th century. Monarchist solutions were bruited about during the writing of the Constitution and the first decade of the American Republic: John Adams thought that the country would move in such a direction and other leaders at the time, including Washington, Madison and Hamilton, wondered privately if a king would be necessary in the event a “republican remedy” failed.

The 1830s, commonly seen as the height of Jacksonian democracy, were racked by violent expulsions of Catholics , Mormons and abolitionists of both races, along with thousands of Native peoples dispossessed of their homelands and sent to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

The new democratic politics of the time was often marked by Election Day violence after campaigns suffused with military cadences, while elected officials usually required the support of elite patrons to guarantee the bonds they had to post. Even in state legislatures and Congress, weapons could be brandished and duels arranged; “bullies” enforced the wills of their allies.

When enslavers in the Southern states resorted to secession rather than risk their system under a Lincoln administration, they made clear that their Confederacy was built on the cornerstone of slavery and white supremacy. And although their crushing defeat brought abolition, the establishment of birthright citizenship (except for Native peoples), the political exclusion of Confederates, and the extension of voting rights to Black men — the results of one of the world’s great revolutions — it was not long before the revolution went into reverse.

The federal government soon allowed former Confederates and their white supporters to return to power, destroy Black political activism and, accompanied by lynchings (expressing the “will” of white communities), build the edifice of Jim Crow: segregation, political disfranchisement and a harsh labor regime. Already previewed in the pre-Civil War North, Jim Crow received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court and the administration of Woodrow Wilson .

Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.

The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

Most worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan, energized by anti-Catholicism and antisemitism as well as anti-Black racism, marched brazenly in cities great and small. The Klan became a mass movement and wielded significant political power; it was crucial, for example , to the enforcement of Prohibition. Once the organization unraveled in the late 1920s, many Klansmen and women found their way to new fascist groups and the radical right more generally.

Sidelined by the Great Depression and New Deal, the illiberal right regained traction in the late 1930s, and during the 1950s won grass-roots support through vehement anti-Communism and opposition to the civil rights movement. As early as 1964, in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama began to hone a rhetoric of white grievance and racial hostility that had appeal in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic, and Barry Goldwater’s campaign that year, despite its failure, put winds in the sails of the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom.

Four years later, Wallace mobilized enough support as a third-party candidate to win five states. And in 1972, once again as a Democrat, Wallace racked up primary wins in both the North and the South before an assassination attempt forced him out of the race. Growing backlashes against school desegregation and feminism added further fuel to the fire on the right, paving the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, the neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke had won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature and nearly three-fifths of the white vote in campaigns for governor and senator. Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, called for “America First,” the fortification of the border (a “Buchanan fence”), and a culture war for the “soul” of America, while the National Rifle Association became a powerful force on the right and in the Republican Party.

When Mr. Trump questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president, a project that quickly became known as “birtherism,” he made use of a Reconstruction-era racist trope that rejected the legitimacy of Black political rights and power. In so doing, Mr. Trump began to cement a coalition of aggrieved white voters. They were ready to push back against the nation’s growing cultural diversity — embodied by Mr. Obama — and the challenges they saw to traditional hierarchies of family, gender and race. They had much on which to build.

Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “ Illiberal America: a History .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .