When a person reads or hears the word “caste,” the social order in India is what typically comes to mind, not America. From the Brahmins at the top to the untouchables at the bottom rung, this caste system governed social interactions in India until the 1950s. Much as discrimination based on caste has been illegal in India for over half of a century, discrimination based on race has been illegal in the United States of over half a century, as well. Michelle Alexander posits, in her book The New Jim Crow, that a social order based on race caste arose from the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in America. Alexander suggests America’s history can be described as a recurring struggle between those who want racial equality, and those who want to sustain a racial caste system
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Unfortunately, those who wish to sustain the racial caste system devise a new system, using new legal justifications to achieve the same result. The New Jim Crow walks the reader through the parallels of Jim Crow laws and the new race discriminatory system involving mass imprisonment.
Michelle Alexander begins the book by bringing attention to the fact that slavery in the United States succeeded due to it being a system of racial control. The racial caste system that was slavery did its job perfectly: designated an inferior status to people of color, legalizing brutal control systems, and defined a black person as slave (Alexander, p. 197). The end of slavery at the end of the Civil War offered hope to the newly freed slaves and frightened the proponents of the former racial caste system. As freed people regrouped around the country, actively created their own communities and, established their own educational systems, the former slave-owners that relied heavily on the newly abolished institution of slavery, headed back to their foxholes to
Unfortunately, those who wish to sustain the racial caste system devise a new system, using new legal justifications to achieve the same result. The New Jim Crow walks the reader through the parallels of Jim Crow laws and the new race discriminatory system involving mass imprisonment.
Michelle Alexander begins the book by bringing attention to the fact that slavery in the United States succeeded due to it being a system of racial control. The racial caste system that was slavery did its job perfectly: designated an inferior status to people of color, legalizing brutal control systems, and defined a black person as slave (Alexander, p. 197). The end of slavery at the end of the Civil War offered hope to the newly freed slaves and frightened the proponents of the former racial caste system. As freed people regrouped around the country, actively created their own communities and, established their own educational systems, the former slave-owners that relied heavily on the newly abolished institution of slavery, headed back to their foxholes to