In the United States, we see minimum harsh punishments given to drug criminals because the court system, in order to save money and other resources, doesn’t want to hear the drug court cases. When drug cases appear in court, it is up to the judge to decide the sentencing for the criminal. Many judges are awarding these criminals with a minimum harsh sentencing right away, making everything easier for the courts by not even having the case go to court. According to the book, The New Jim Crow, written by Michelle Alexander, “‘The value of a mandatory minimum sentence lies not in its imposition, but in its value as a bargaining chip to be given away in return for the resource-saving plea from the defendant to a more leniently sanctioned charge’”…
Book review: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander In the book, the New Jim Crow, Alexander Michelle gives a descriptive information of how the American government is set up to put down the Black community. She argues that the current system is just a successor of the other past system of slavery. For each chapter, the author makes detailed explanations of her points. With subtitles, she is able to touch on every component within her topics.…
In The New Jim Crow, author Michele Alexander suggests that mass imprisonment of African Americans in the late 20th and early 21st centuries established a totally new racial caste system. This new system was strikingly oppressive and this novel explores the topic of racial injustice in America’s legal systems today. Alexander proves her claim by referring to racial problems in the past, such as the War on Drugs and Civil Rights. The War on Drugs correlates to past problems. The first claim Alexander argues is, “The War on Drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage” (Alexander 185).…
Alexander compares Jim crow back in the days to the mass of incarceration today, which she calls “The New Jim Crow” to prove that Colored people are still being held in captivity against their own mighty will. Jim Crow emerged in the 1880s after slavery and the Civil war. Blacks were segregated from whites. They were not allowed to use the same things. For example, they had a color bathroom and White bathroom.…
African Americans had long battled the issue of equal protection under the law as well as equal rights and representation. It is no secret that African Americans were struggling to regain their self-worth after experiencing several hundred years of slavery. Given that times have long since progressed, one would assume we would possess the same rights as White Americans. This is not at all the case; it is almost the exact opposite. In the work “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander, the reader is intruded to one of the most perpetual realities of our time; African Americans are being funneled, in great numbers, into the prison system.…
The New Jim Crow by Alexander is a book about the era of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is the imprisoning of many people who are African American on the premise of their race. Mass incarceration was a political campaign. It was created to keep those in the minority as the underclass. It essentially created a caste system.…
Welcome to America: Home of the Oppressed Many people in society today believe one can excel in life simply because of the color of their skin. While some people, whites, excel in life, there are is an opposite group who are suppressed, blacks. Since the beginning of American history, white individuals have suppressed the black race by slavery, segregation, and even mass incarceration. Even though the addition of the Civil Rights amendments guaranteed equal rights for blacks in the United States, a new method of racial segregation in the United States exists. The author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, believes blacks are still suppressed in today’s society.…
Access to the Privileges of Citizenship In the book “The New Jim Crow,” Alexander argues that there is a racial caste system within the United States perpetuated by mass incarceration and the war on drugs. The death of slavery and segregation only gave way to a new form of discrimination through which the government can legally discriminate against people who are labeled “criminals”. She claims that the war on drugs specifically targets people of color and relegates them to a second class citizenship analogous to that which was present during the days of Jim Crow. By bringing these topics up Alexander hopes to start a discussion amongst civil rights activists and the general public about the current criminal justice system.…
The New Jim Crow In Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” the author makes a case that modern African-Americans are under the control of the criminal justice system. This includes African Americans who are incarcerated in prisons and jails as well as those on probation or parole. Alexander claims that there are more African Americans under the thumb of the criminal justice system today than were enslaved in 1850. Moreover, discrimination against African Americans is also at an all-time high in the housing, education, and employment sectors and with regard to voting rights.…
Race relations have been around for decades, and things haven’t changed so much since the incident in Little Rock on September 4th, 1957. Most African Americans still find it hard to be included into the White American society because there are still people in the world that choose not to accept them, due to the color of their skin. They are still being mistreated and judged and people always assume the worst from them in every given situation. In the article, “The Myth of Race” by Agustin Fuentes, he explains the question about human variation and how we can tell everyone apart from each other and how it’s all just a myth. I believe that people who discriminate against anyone of color need to understand that we are all the same on the inside and we are the ones who make the categories between each other.…
Race/ethnicity is a category of difference that greatly effects one’s position in society in the United States, especially for persons of color and even more specifically for people of Black or African American descent.…
Racism is a very sensitive subject to discuss. So, why it is that racism still exists today in our very own home, the United States of America, the country of freedom and dreams? Racism is still alive and well because people have different views depending where they were raised. Both Thomas Jefferson 's Notes on the State of Virginia and Michelle Alexander 's book, The New Jim Crow present prime examples of the portrayal of Black American, as seen from the perspective of both White and Black Americans, throughout the late 1700s and into the present.…
The New Black is defined as the hinderance of African Americans in today 's society. The New Black does not meet the goals previously set in the African diaspora and it does not encompass full citizenship for African Americans. The income inequality of blacks is another reason proving that race still matters in the twenty first century. In conclusion, Ifemelu 's blog post in regards to the question "Is race an invention or not?" is a great way to explain the misconception of race (Chimamanda Ngozi 374). Race is a flawed social construct that divides the human population based on physical characteristics.…
All throughout time, people have been divided due to their differences. People who see others that are different from them will often immediately decide that they are “weird” and put those people lower than themselves. According to Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe in their passage, “Theories and Constructs of Race,” Race is just a social construct made by humans to exclude people based on what they look like, where they are from, their culture, etc. If scientists were to look at someone’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) compared to another person with, say, different colored skin, they would notice that there is not much of a difference between the two people. Therefore, as Holtzman and Sharpe say, “race is constructed socially, culturally, politically,…
In the article, “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander vigorously argues the means in which the American prison system disenfranchises poor people of color by creating a dynamic author-reader relationship through the use of pathos, logos, and ethos, to effectively persuade and appeal her claims to the reader. Utilizing the pathos approach, Alexander evokes emotion from the readers through her use of emotive and visual diction. Moreover, Alexander uses the ethos approach by including the sources and citations or the information she presents her audience. Alongside these citations, the author refers to her own expertise as a lawyer through her personal narratives and simultaneously builds her credibility as a writer. Furthermore, she strategically…