In Black America Podcast: The New Jim Crow with Michelle Alexander
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She currently holds a joint appointment with Ohio State’s Mortiz College of Law and Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity where she teaches courses regarding race, civil rights and criminal justice.
More African American men are incarcerated, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850. More African American men are denied the right to vote today than in 1870, because they’re felons. In some American cities, the majority of African American men are felons for life. Felons can be discriminated against in housing, jobs, public benefits and jury service. In her book, Alexander argues the mass incarceration of African Americans — the result of America’s War on Drugs — has created a new racial caste system in this country. She says that gone is the explicit racial language of Jim Crow. Instead, today’s second–class citizens are called “criminals.”
Podcast: Download (26.5MB)
