The New Jim Crow Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Summary: 5. The New Jim Crow

This chapter looks at how structural racism enables the New Jim Crow to exist in plain sight in American society.

Prominent Americans including Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, and Tyra Banks have wondered where the Black fathers and Black men in America have gone. Absent Black fathers are blamed for the poverty and violence in predominantly Black neighborhoods. What they do not talk about is that they know exactly where Black men are: in prison. They have been put there by the War on Drugs. When the War on Drugs was first launched, it had to be promoted and sold to society as a problem. Now that it is part of the judicial system, people of all colors barely notice it exists. Until the mass incarceration system is acknowledged as a system of racial marginalization, and not simply the judicial system being “tough on crime,” young Black men will continue to disappear.

Many Americans do know that an unequal number of Black and brown men are behind bars in the United States but have little idea how to change it. Denial can help people function when knowing that wrongs are being committed. In some cases, racism also plays a part, as people rely on old stereotypes to say that these “criminals” probably deserved their fate. Denial of mass incarceration is also much easier. Jim Crow blatantly separated the races with signs and open racism. In the days of mass incarceration, racism manifests through unequal access to decent housing and education. If there is little interaction among races, there are fewer opportunities to discover the truth of mass incarceration.

The widespread belief that the judicial system is colorblind also keeps people from inquiring too much about why so many Black young men have been enveloped by this system. People are arrested for drug crimes. Therefore, they must be criminals. That they are predominantly Black men is irrelevant. People fail to see that racism can be embedded in the basic structures of society. The theorist, Iris Marion Young, describes structural racism like a birdcage. The wires represent the laws and practices such as racial profiling, biased sentencing, and job discrimination that form a trap around Black men in America. Some people would argue that there is a door to the birdcage, and that it can be opened by choosing to not commit a drug crime. This argument avoids understanding that the door is locked due to few alternate opportunities. Black and brown men born in impoverished urban ghettos, who may not have consistent housing, or food, and who attend sparsely funded schools, find out quickly that the best option for them is selling drugs.

Nobody is telling them anything different. Instead of communities with well-funded schools providing opportunities for people of color, these communities simply function as way stations for people returning from prison. Young Black men in these communities find themselves harassed by police who assume that they will soon be arrested for drug possession. Young Black men are told they will be drug felons, and to a large extent they fulfill this prophecy. Although crime (and specifically drug offenses) may be committed at the same rate by white people, they are not arrested at the same rates. They do not have to deal with the racial stigma of being assumed a criminal before conviction or after conviction. Once released from prison, they usually have more support from family and within their communities to help them reintegrate. Young whites who may have made “bad decisions” and been caught, in general still have a chance to attend college and have meaningful lives. A drug conviction for a Black student is often the end of a productive life.

Race as a deciding factor in the judicial system becomes clearer when comparing sentencing for different crimes. A grassroots crack down on drunk driving rose in the 1980s at the same time as the War on Drugs was launched. Drunk driving actually caused more overall deaths than all drug-related deaths at this time, but because most drunk drivers were white and male, the penalties were not as severe. Even today, drunk drivers are usually charged with misdemeanors and receive sentences involving fines and community service. The emphasis is on rehabilitation and reintegration into society, and helping offenders overcome the addiction. This contrasts starkly with how drug offenders are treated. They are usually poor people of color, who are charged with felonies and sentenced to prison. The effect is to marginalize them from society, rather than reintegrate them.

This new system of mass incarceration has been allowed to develop because society has a racial indifference to African Americans. When the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s successfully upended the Jim Crow laws, there was an opportunity to provide community investment, quality education and job training to help African Americans succeed. These constructive interventions could have helped workers of all colors survive the trough transition to a new global economy when the economic downturn of the 1970s arrived. Instead, conservatives manipulated the fear generated by a rise in crime and the anger generated by job losses and created a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. Media campaigns acted on inherent racism, blaming the rise in crime rates on African Americans. The next step was to declare a “War on Drugs,” targeting urban centers where many, now jobless, African Americans lived. The resulting mass incarceration system continues to strip Black men of their livelihoods and rights. The effects of this new system are perhaps even worse than Jim Crow or slavery, as it renders African Americans unnecessary. Their unskilled labor is no longer valued and society has deemed them unworthy of retraining.

Anybody who can leave these ghettos of mass unemployment, poor housing and lack of opportunities, do so. Those who are left are increasingly segregated and marginalized from society. They are extensions of the mass incarceration system which has developed to monitor, arrest and sentence thousands of Black men to prison. The criminal justice system no longer exists to prevent crime, but to initiate the offenders into a lifetime of government control and economic marginalization.

Analysis: 5. The New Jim Crow

Alexander begins this chapter with a powerful anecdote from Barack Obama’s historic presidential candidacy to illustrate how deeply engrained denial about the fate of Black men in America is. She states that even Obama, the first Black American president and the emblem to many of racial progress, blamed Black men for their own disappearance in a campaign speech illustrates that the narrative of personal responsibility is a keystone to ongoing discrimination. She says that because Obama made the speech during his campaign, it calls into question the ways that Obama needed to play the role of the “good Black man” in order to secure the presidency—adding that by giving the speech on Father’s Day, Obama offered himself as an exemplar of his race, using his own success to argue against the personal failings of other Black men. Alexander gives many examples of other Black celebrities and institutions who have echoed the seemingly genuine query about where all the Black men have gone, suggesting that this denial runs deep in Black and white consciousnesses alike. The specter of the millions of incarcerated Black men and the Black men injured or murdered by the police hangs over this question, and Alexander makes clear that, on some level, the people asking this question know the answer.

Alexander highlights how difficult it can be for many to understand structural racism and borrows the metaphor of a birdcage to help make structural racism more explicit for readers. The birdcage metaphor works on multiple levels. One, it encapsulates how individual aspects of society (like criminal laws and housing policy) can work independently (like the wires of a cage) to create an overwhelming barrier to freedom. Two, it makes explicit how taking a look at a single aspect of a discriminatory culture, such as explicitly racist language or actions, is like looking just at one wire of a cage. This makes it impossible to understand how trapped Black Americans truly are. Three, it calls to mind the jail cell, the literal cage that millions of Black Americans are locked in, viscerally invoking that systemic racism itself is the prison. Alexander carries through the metaphor of the cage to help readers comprehend how the whole system works to create a world in which Black people are stuck in an inferior caste.

The base of the cage is the discriminatory ideas about Black people held by society, law enforcement, and Black people themselves. The corrosive ideas that make a police officer more likely to stop a Black man for a drug search are the same ideas many Black men may hold about themselves. When authorities and teachers and newscasters tell the story that people who look like you are criminals, dangerous, and unworthy of mercy, it’s difficult not to believe those things about yourself. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which, because Black men are told their entire lives that they are going to be criminals, that people who look like them and come from the neighborhoods they do, will end up in prison, it makes that path that much more difficult to avoid. Alexander illustrates that denial operates on a corrosive level here, too. Mainstream culture often argues that Black people are in prison more often because they commit more crimes. This is not just untrue, but the very repetition of that idea ignores the fact that treating people like criminals makes it that much more difficult for them not to become criminals.

Alexander argues for a systemic view of racism in America by illustrating how individual actors, organizations, and ideas work together to create and uphold the new Jim Crow. She mentions the arguments of colorblindness or individual responsibility, which are the prevailing racial perspectives in the country, and examines how, again and again, these ideologies do not explain the depth and endurance of racism in America. Belief in individual responsibility and in “bad actors” both in law enforcement and in those accused of crime keeps the nation trapped in a cycle of finger-pointing and denial. Alexander explicitly outlines how the broken mass incarceration system really works and the devastating, inescapable impact it has on millions of Black people in order to change the narrative around where responsibility lies. It’s only through naming that mass incarceration keeps millions of Black citizens under government control, much like Jim Crow, that the country can begin to understand the true depth of its problems.

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