The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

I read one of the most important nonfiction books of the modern era, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, still relevant fifteen years after its 2010 publication.

Though drug use and distribution is consistent across races, law enforcement polices Black communities at starkly disproportional rates. And ever since Reagan launched the War on Drugs, the penalties for drug use are draconian. Drug offensives that would result in a few months or a year turn become years and decades in the United States.

Even if the sentence is light, the punishment stays with the offender forever. Former felons may be denied the right to vote and the right to serve on juries…and more importantly in terms of basic survival, they may be denied housing, public benefits, and employment.

The American criminal justice system prosecutes Black people for drug crimes at far higher rates than other races, leading to a form of social control that is the descendent of Jim Crow laws, in turn descended from chattel slavery. And like Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of Black people, especially Black men, is on the surface race neutral. Under Jim Crow, anyone could vote if they could pass a literacy test, regardless of color; but since the tests were only administered to Black people, illiterate whites still maintained civil rights not afforded to illiterate people of other races.

“Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: A new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness,” writes Alexander. In one of the more heartbreaking passages in a book filled with sorrow, she describes how this is true even among Black people, who are often ashamed to share with their neighbors that a loved one has been incarcerated. Slavery and Jim Crow were visible, while the mass incarceration of Black men is not.

Of books about Black people in the United States written in the twentieth century, I rank The New Jim Crows as essential reading. If you read in Black Studies at all, you will have heard of it, but if you have not personally read it, I encourage you to move it to the top of your TBR.