The One Group Bigots Are Still Allowed to Hate

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 88
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Imagine living in a community where, on average, almost one-third of your male population has been to prison. Where, in some regions, the number approaches four-fifths. Where, because your men have a criminal record, they’re forever barred from public housing, food assistance, and student loans, meaning they can’t get the three things they need to escape a life of poverty: a stable address, square meals, and job skills. For the rest of their natural lives.

You don’t need to imagine. Michelle Alexander, professor at Ohio State University, lays out copious evidence that this describes the African American community today. Outright bigotry is condemned today, and laws prohibit racial discrimination in housing, employment, and other avenues. But it remains perfectly legal to discriminate against ex-convicts. And if black Americans have criminal records at rates disproportionate to their actual tendency to commit crime, um, it’s nobody’s fault, really. So we tell ourselves.

Sometime around 1980, American fears of drugs and drug criminals permitted us to excuse remarkable leaps of justice to keep criminals at heel. Though Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, his war was essentially rhetorical. Under Ronald Reagan, a perfect confluence of moral outrage, conservative voting, and economic instability made Americans willing to accept paternalistic appeals to keep us safe from scary criminals. Those criminals happened, in public imagination, to be black.

So the federal government shifted focus and money away from enforcing white-collar crime and onto drugs. Anti-drug rhetoric has often focused on “kingpins” like Pablo Escobar and El Chapo; but enforcement has focused on street-corner dealers and people using at home. Aggressive police stops and searches, called “pretext stops,” encouraged slews of lawsuits. The Supreme Court so willingly acknowledged Drug War rhetoric that it’s accepted major waivers in the Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

Evidence indicates African Americans and white Americans use drugs at roughly the same rate, while whites are one-third more likely to deal, and three times as likely to get admitted to emergency rooms. Yet three-quarters of America’s drug prisoners and ex-convicts are black; in some jurisdictions, that number reaches 90%. Current case law, though, excuses systematic racism unless complainants can prove racial intent in specific cases. A little race-neutral dressing, and runaway racism becomes legal.

Michelle Alexander

Nor do racial slants stop at the jailhouse door. It’s perfectly legal to discriminate against ex-convicts in housing, employment, civil rights, and more, so once convicted, individuals remain social outcasts forever. Ex-criminals wind up in impoverished neighborhoods, surrounded mostly by other ex-cons. This includes both public and private spheres. Even states that restore convicts’ voting rights after prison, often require such high standards of paperwork and restitution, that law-abiding citizens remain permanently outside functioning democracy.

America has the largest prison population in world history. Alexander estimates that when she wrote, in 2010, over two million Americans were in prison or on probation or parole. The American criminal justice system doesn’t just warehouse people convicted of crimes, some embarassingly penny-ante; it’s also become a major jobs program, especially in rural areas. Fixing this system would require destabilizing the American economy, at least temporarily. But economic and criminal injustice is manifest, now.

Unlike slavery or Jim Crow, control mechanisms that explicitly made distinctions between people according to race, today’s mass incarceration system is nominally race-neutral. There’s no single point we can indicate and say, “Racism lives here.” We aren’t really repressing black or Hispanic Americans by enforcing laws. Except unconscious biases running through most American minds, including law enforcement professionals, coach us to perceive stereotypical criminals as dark-hued and ghettoized. So selected communities get disproportionate police scrutiny.

Alexander admits her analogy between racialized justice and Jim Crow is imperfect. Police sweeps sometimes net white people (mostly expendable poor white trash), while African Americans sometimes become media darlings, even getting elected President. But exceptions don’t undermine the trends. America’s prisoners are disproportionately black, and African American men are disproportionately likely to have lifelong criminal records. This results in a form of legalized discrimination that, while superficially race-neutral, breaks down along distinct color lines.

To her credit, Alexander avoids prescriptive attempts to resolve this problem. She even acknowledges that repairs could create new problems. With this volume, she primarily emphasizes that a problem exists, that Americans have accepted a massive gap between the post-racial ideals we espouse with our mouths, and the racialized justice system we’ve created through our actions. She merely makes us aware. Now it’s on us citizens to decide what we’ll do with her chilling information.