The War on Drugs is not explicitly racist and, in this age of post-civil rights color blindness, a huge injustice continues across the United States, which has the largest incarcerated population in the world that is also disproportionately black and brown. Michelle Alexander tells us nothing new that those committed to prison abolition and/or racial justice already know. In addition, her work lacks the overt political consciousness of the ties between capitalism, mass incarceration, and racism. Though implicit in her calls for building interracial alliances of lower-class whites and people of color to dismantle the new Jim Crow of mass incarceration for black and brown men, her failure to name capitalism as the problem is masked by several references to Martin Luther King's call for restructuring American society. However, perhaps by not explicitly stating an anti-capitalist stance, Alexander maximized her readership, which she also succeeded in doing by making the book quite accessible to those without a background in African American history, sociology, and racial justice. Personally, the book almost dumbed down key aspects in history, such as the slave trade and race in the US during the colonial and antebellum periods.
I also appreciated her references that obliterated cultural arguments for the prevalence of crime in ghetto black communities which assume blacks have inferior moral culture and values that manifests in criminality, absent fathers, and broken neighborhoods. Indeed, she cites statistics that indicate whites may be more likely to be engaged in criminal drug dealing as well as drunk driving and other crimes but since drug crimes are racially coded in the colorblind rhetoric of the War on Drugs, which targets drug dealing primarily in black and brown communities, blacks and Latinos have suffered disproportionately from excessive, no tolerance policies that have skyrocketed prison populations. These aforementioned black and brown "criminals" receive less than equal treatment in the legal system at every stage, since juries are mostly white through racially-motivated striking peremptorily of black jurors, discrepancies in crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, harsher sentences for black offenders, and numerous other systemic failures of the legal system to ensure access to legal representation and the discretion of prosecutors for choosing sentences/charges. .
She also goes into great detail the stigmatization of black and brown men (and she focuses entirely on men here, though acknowledging the problem of rising female incarceration in the beginning of the book) as a life-long process akin to slavery and Jim Crow by stripping millions of citizenship practices such as voting, participating in a jury and access to work and housing (federal housing denies those with felony convictions and landlord discrimination as well as employment discrimination) which leads to recidivism as many turn to drug dealing again to make ends meet, support families, or pay for housing. And this is not solely due to felony or ex-felon status, since race plays everything in it by allowing people to discriminate in ways based on stereotypes of black violence, criminality, or other perceived characteristics of alleged black inferiority by hiding behind the felon status, a permanent mark of societal Otherness and lack of regard for the lives of about 30 percent of black men (and untold millions related to them).
It was also interesting to read Alexander's problem with affirmative action as approached by most racial justice advocates, which includes rendering mass incarceration invisible, it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try, it has encouraged the embrace of "trickle down theory of racial justice,"it has failed to facilitate the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration and it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now assumes that it is the main battlefront in US race relations. I agree with her assertion that affirmative action has become one of the center campaigns in civil rights and racial justice circles because it's easier to defend than the humanity of those whose humanity is unrecognized due to alleged criminality, which does not justify ignoring the mass incarceration of black and brown people.
Indeed, she links this attitude to the civil rights movement's abandonment of Claudette Colvin for Rosa Parks for a more respectable, "moral" person as the symbol for the desegregation of Montgomery buses in 1955. However, I do disagree with her in that I see a possibility to bridge the two and connect both in campaigns for racial justice. One could simply continue defending affirmative action while devoting more time to the prison industrial complex by pushing for legislation and executive power to end the War on Drugs, reduce penalties for drug arrests as well as legalizing marijuana and others, and pushing the Supreme Court to overturn past decisions that negatively impact sentencing and shift away from colorblind rhetoric which masks the disproportionate impact of the War on Drugs and predatory policing on communities of color. Once achieved, the battle should continue to defend affirmative action, increase funding to public schools while closing prisons, providing education and training to ex-prisoners, and, simultaneously, continuing to defend affirmative action to help perpetuate the existence of the African American middle class. Though one may agree with Alexander that affirmative action does support a trickle down theory of racial justice, it will remain a necessary tool for ensuring black presences in college institutions as well as certain forms of employment, so it should and will remain a part of racial justice, albeit one of lesser importance in terms of ensuring an end to the prison industrial complex and the War on Drugs, two clearly linked phenomena.
One of the shortcomings of the book was the absence of prison abolitionist sentiments. Though expressed somewhat in describing the terrible lives of those imprisoned like birds in cages as well as those released who still face insurmountable obstacles that make re-entering society difficult, she never endorses complete prison abolition and the implementation of restorative justice as ways to address non-drug related violence and what to do with those incarcerated for those reasons. Perhaps this was part of her attempt to maintain as wide a readership and accessibility as possible, but given her acknowledgment of the dehumanizing aspects of the prison system, why not just abolish it in its entirety and endeavor to create the society based on love she alludes to in the lofty rhetoric Dr. King? Her reduction of black affirmative action beneficiaries as middle-class and upper-middle-class lacks the dynamic approach of Mary Pattillo, a black sociologist whose work specializes in revealing the unique conditions of the black middle class, which are far more likely than their white counterparts to experience downward social mobility, attend inferior schools, and live in neighborhoods plagued by police raids and violence due to the War on Drugs. Thus, I believe Alexander could have given a more nuanced depiction of affirmative action that addresses the particular tendencies noticed by sociologists regarding the black middle-class, which in many cases needs affirmative action as a protection from downward social mobility.
Some random quotes
"While young minority men with little schooling have always had relatively high rates of incarceration, 'before the 1980s the penal system was not a dominant presence in the disadvantaged neighborhoods.'"
"The total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area."
"White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote."
"The decision to wage the drug war primarily in black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African Americans but not whites on freeways and trains stations has had precisely the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era."
"This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility—a feature it actually shares with its predecessors."
"Because most Americans, including those within law enforcement, want to believe they are non-racist, the suffering in the drug war crosses the color line."
"We may improve some districts, prolong affirmative action for another decade or two, or force some police districts to condemn racial profiling, but we will not put a dent in the prevailing caste system. We must face the realities of the new caste system and embrace those who are most oppressed by it if we hope to end the new Jim Crow."
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