Summary: 1. The Rebirth of Caste

This chapter outlines the history of caste systems in the United States.

Racial caste initially appeared in America as a method of controlling labor in the new English colonies. This system then grew to be the underpinning of the agriculture economy in the Southern colonies. The Southern planter elite used their economic power to preserve this racial caste system within the Constitution of the United States. This made it easier for different forms of control to rise later. Following the Civil War, previously enslaved African Americans were granted the most freedom they had ever enjoyed, but the existing structure of racism (that had helped to justify slavery) was not as easily outlawed. Conservative whites developed a new set of laws that came to be known as Jim Crow. These laws denied African Americans access to the same facilities and opportunities as Southern whites and made it very difficult for African Americans to succeed. It was racial control in a different form.

When looking at the history of two previous caste systems, slavery and Jim Crow, a pattern emerges. There is a period following the downfall of the systems, in which new freedoms are enjoyed by African Americans. A backlash follows, encouraged by Southern white conservatives, who still believe in white supremacy and the separation of the races. These conservative voices find that economic downturns are especially useful. In bad economic times, lower-class whites, along with African Americans, are usually severely affected. Lower-class Southern whites become more receptive to blaming job losses on African Americans. They help to elect conservative governments, which then have the power to construct a new racial caste system. This new system may be difficult to detect at first, as it may differ in its language, or application. The effects of these new laws have proven to be no less damaging than slavery to African Americans. 

At the end of the US Civil War, the South lay in economic ruin. The federal government had prevented the United States from breaking apart. It then tried to rebuild the Southern states. The new South would no longer rely on slave labor. This period of Reconstruction saw the passage of several amendments to the Constitution to ensure the freedoms of African Americans. First, they were finally freed from enslavement. They were then granted full citizenship, as well as equal protection of the laws, and the right to vote. However, the granting of these rights only proved to white conservatives the need for a new system of control. Local governments began employing poll taxes and literacy tests to limit the number of African Americans who could vote. If voters did not have money to pay the tax or could not read well enough to pass a test, they were not allowed to vote. Vagrancy laws were enacted making it a crime to be jobless. African Americans were targeted, arrested, and sentenced to work crews, effectively replacing slave labor with prison labor. 

Challenges to these laws were difficult to mount because they were in violation of federal laws and had to be tried in federal court. This was usually beyond the ability of any African American in the South at the time. This encouraged Southern states to pass many laws segregating the races in all kinds of situations. This racial caste system became known as Jim Crow. 

Eventually, as society became less tolerant of segregation, the Jim Crow laws were dismantled as well. The passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965, caused immediate changes in the daily lives of African Americans in the South. Suddenly, African Americans were free to eat in restaurants and ride in trains. The percentage of African American voters also rose tremendously in the South. Again, the underlying racism created by slavery proved harder to eradicate. Powerful white conservatives still believed that African Americans were inherently less capable, and in some cases, dangerous. Crime rates in many cities increased at this time. Conservatives at the national level began to campaign for “law and order.” They played on underlying racial fears and implied that African Americans were largely responsible for increased crime rates. This strategy helped convince many lower-class Southern whites who had previously voted Democratic, to vote Republican. This new coalition of voters sent the Republican Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. The Reagan administration immediately focused on fulfilling the campaign promise of “law and order.” In 1982, before there was even a drug problem, the Reagan administration declared a “War on Drugs.” They then set about making it a reality by reshaping the criminal justice system.

The “War on Drugs” coincided with a large economic downturn that disproportionately affected inner cities, where many African Americans lived and worked. Many factories were closing down and shifting blue-collar jobs overseas, where unions were non-existent and wages were a fraction of what they were in the United States. The new factory jobs that did appear were usually located in the suburbs, and most inner city-dwelling African Americans did not have access to automobiles. With few legitimate alternatives, selling drugs became a better option. Crack cocaine appeared in 1985, which led to a spike in violence as drug markets worked to stabilize, and further justified the “War on Drugs.” 

President George Bush continued to highlight the drug problem, because it served political agendas, not because it was a significant problem. Even Democrats needed to be “tough on crime” in order to get elected. President Bill Clinton played up his “tough on crime” credentials during the 1992 campaign, and once elected passed a $30 billion crime bill. During the Reagan administration, Congress laid the groundwork for mass incarceration by creating minimum sentences for possession of small amounts of drugs. The new crime bill went further, mandating life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized money for state prisons and local police forces.

Continuing to appeal to more conservative voters, Clinton promoted changes to the welfare system as cost-saving efforts. To save money, the new system imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance and eliminated it entirely for anyone convicted for a felony drug offense. Federally assisted public housing projects were required to exclude anyone with a criminal history, effectively making many Black men homeless.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 2 million people are in prison as a result of increased policing and mandated minimum sentencing. Those who make it out of prison contribute to an ever-increasing number of ex-offenders who are barred from employment, housing, access to education and denied the right to vote. The disproportionate number of Black and brown offenders who are caught by this system effectively makes it a new racial caste. This new system of mass incarceration is hiding within the criminal justice system. The New Jim Crow has arrived.

Analysis: 1. The Rebirth of Caste

Alexander describes a pattern throughout American history in which the white elite strengthens their power by exploiting Black labor and lives. History repeating itself despite the illusion of racial progress emerges as a theme of the book. Alexander examines what happens when racial caste systems collapse and finds that new systems to control and curtail Black citizens have always emerged, often using new language and rhetoric to mask old racist values. After the Emancipation, though Black Americans were free in the white imagination, Jim Crow laws in many ways replicated the same economic and social barriers that prevented Black success during slavery. By the time Jim Crow laws were widely repealed, the foundations for a new system of mass incarceration were already being laid. The people who were labeled as “felons” were disproportionately Black. They were disenfranchised, kept from their families, and barred from economic success much in the same way slaves were, once again upholding the nation’s intrenched racial caste system.

The use of language as a tool of social control to uphold the racial caste system also emerges as a theme in this chapter. Alexander states that since the Constitution was written, white politicians have been using coded language to oppress or erase Black citizens. For example, though the word slave or Negro was never used in the Constitution, James Madison and other founders believed that the nation should be formed to protect the wealthy minority against the impoverished majority. Thus, the obvious but unspoken goal of the Constitution was to protect slavery and uphold the existing racial caste system.

In another example of the use of language as a tool of social control, Alexander notes that, because overtly racist sentiments fell out of fashion after the genocide of World War II, proponents of racial hierarchies in America begin to use language around “law and order” instead of “segregation forever.” However, the rhetoric around “law and order” was developed in direct opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and was a coded way to talk about suppressing Black power without using overtly racist language. Ronald Reagan used language around “welfare queens” and “predators,” coded phrases that allowed him to claim racial neutrality while appealing to the race-based anxieties of white voters. By adapting language to the sensibilities of the moment, the white elite increasingly claimed colorblindness while creating systems that continued to punish Black citizens, succeeding in preserving the racial caste system for centuries.

Alexander describes recurring instances of the elite preventing alliances between impoverished groups across color lines as an integral part of maintaining the racial caste system. Given that the elite few have always wanted to maintain power over the majority, it is in their best interest to sow seeds of disharmony between lower-class groups that may share economic goals. Alexander illustrates that the growth of slavery itself was, in part, due to planters’ fear that poor whites would join forces with slaves and rebel against their shared conditions. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, a multiracial revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite, landowners gave poor whites more economic power and deputized them to police slaves, thereby incentivizing their support of the institution of slavery.

Similarly, Jim Crow laws were, in part, the elite white response to a growing Populist movement, a multiracial alliance of working-class people. The rhetoric of law and order also preyed on poor whites’ existing racial stereotypes, demonizing Black citizens and painting them as criminals who needed increased policing. This effort increased political power for those espousing the law-and-order rhetoric and encouraged poor whites to believe that they were competing for resources with undeserving Black people. Through these examples, Alexander illustrates that elite whites reap economic and political advantage by stoking racial fear in poor whites and preventing coalition between poor people of all races.

Alexander presents one of her central themes—that the War on Drugs is, in fact, a racially motivated campaign to disenfranchise Black citizens and provide a scapegoat for economic hardships caused by ineffective political decisions and corporate greed. Alexander notes that increased public concern about the problem of drugs in America did not correlate to the actual severity of the issue or to an increase in drug-related crime, but it did correlate to the amount of political attention focused on the issue. Alexander thus illustrates that the War on Drugs was manufactured to both avert attention from the self-interested decisions of politicians preserving their own wealth and to build political power by covertly convincing white voters that being tough on crime was synonymous with keeping Black citizens in their place within the caste system.