The New Jim Crow Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Summary: 6. The Fire This Time

This chapter discusses how the status quo hinders the elimination of mass incarceration and how the system can be dismantled without laying the ground for a replacement.

Most Americans today believe that the diversity made possible through affirmative action is helping to reduce the amount of impact mass incarceration has on Black and brown families. Civil rights organizations campaign heavily to increase diversity in the workplace, in politics, and in the arts. Today, there are many more Black and brown faces to be found on police forces, fire departments, in schools, on television, in sports, and in entertainment. These small steps toward diversity lead people to believe that racism can be defeated. While it does help bring people of various backgrounds and ethnicities together, and help break down barriers due to ignorance, it still does not address the real issue. The massive level of inequality that exists in urban areas where Black and brown people live is still producing generations of people lost to poverty, drugs and violence.

For every Black student that is lucky enough to receive a scholarship to attend college, there are hundreds of Black children trying to survive in urban ghettos. Their choices are limited, and many find themselves caught in the mass incarceration cycle. Instead of investing in urban areas affected by economic decline, the government has chosen to round people up. Inherent racism has assumed that these people will fail. American society has allowed a system to develop that does not help people overcome poverty but ensures that they are never able to break free.

While affirmative action continues to exist and is supported by people of color, it will be hard to dismantle the system of mass incarceration. People are blinded to the massive numbers of people of color in prison, by the bright lights of successful people of color in mainstream culture. Civil rights advocacy has also been distracted by the success of the lawsuits during the Jim Crow era. This success encouraged a belief that litigation can help break down racist structures, but the courts have made it difficult to bring suit against mass incarceration. Civil rights groups can continue to sue for more diversity in school districts, for acceptance to elite colleges, or to contest racial profiling of innocent Black and brown doctors, but these cases do not attack the racist roots of the system of mass incarceration, which continues unchecked.

To truly dismantle the mass incarceration system, the War on Drugs must be stopped. Financial incentives for police departments to wage the War on Drugs must end. Data show that American taxpayers are not receiving a good return on investment. Mass incarceration costs upward of $2 billion dollars per year but probably reduces crime by 25 percent. This money could be better invested in human capital. Investment should be made in re-entry programs for former inmates and retraining programs for former prison workers. Laws discriminating against ex-offenders, which make it difficult to build functional lives outside prison, should be eliminated. Data show that the poverty that encourages many to return to selling drugs, would be greatly reduced if ex-offenders had an easier time of finding employment.

The inherent racism that has allowed the War on Drugs to supply the mass incarceration system must also be addressed. A history of racism that has not been fully addressed, compounded by public campaigns, has encouraged people to associate drug crime with people of color. Laws can be passed, but if society is not ready to accept them, they may not be enforced. It took the Civil War to enforce an end to slavery, and it took the Civil Rights Movement to ensure that the laws ending Jim Crow were followed. To be truly successful, this campaign should incorporate lower class whites as well. This will ensure that conservative racists are not able to scare lower class whites to abandon shared goals with people of color. A truly broad-based investment in schools and job retraining programs will also help lower class whites.

In the wake of the Civil Rights era, American society has focused on trying to treat people of all races equally. This has led to an idea of colorblindness. The worst manifestation of this is the mass incarceration system. By simply labeling them drug criminals, police have been able to arrest high numbers of Black and brown people. To overcome this, America should embrace the differences, and acknowledge that Black and brown people, as well as poor whites, have been placed at a disadvantage. Americans should come together as humans, not as races, and work together.

Affirmative action programs also actually hinder progress. The success of a few African Americans make it look like the African Americans caught in the cycle of mass incarceration deserve to be there. People can point to African American success stories and say that people have a choice to not commit crime. Affirmative action as a “trickle down” theory also largely fails as well. Not only does it only benefit a small amount of people, but it also tends to alienate whites, who feel that certain positions or successes have been robbed from them because someone has artificially been placed in front of them. It would be better to simply invest in education, job training, and drug rehabilitation programs universally, that would benefit people of all races and backgrounds, than continue to try to help a few people rise above. In many ways, African Americans, as a group, are not doing any better than when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was advocating for change. The child poverty and unemployment rates in Black communities are actually higher than in 1968.

Those who benefit from affirmative action do not necessarily want to wholly change the system. They become part of the system. Police departments across the nation have become more diverse, but they continue to wage war on the Black urban poor. This diversity can make it harder to challenge these institutions and call out racist behavior. These cosmetic changes make it even more difficult to upend the status quo.

To defeat mass incarceration, all Americans must work together to overcome the inequality inherent in American society. White elites must accept that sacrifices in earnings may have to be made to the common good. The benefits will be seen in a reduction of crime and homelessness which plague urban areas. African Americans must accept changes to (or elimination of) affirmative action. If everyone is allowed more equal footing to begin with, affirmative action will be rendered obsolete. The African Americans who will benefit the most are those who have been forgotten in the system of mass incarceration. For them, it is not just a moral question, it is a matter of life and death.

Analysis: 6. The Fire This Time

Alexander begins this chapter with a look at the protests around the Jena 6 to illustrate what works to create change in discriminatory systems and what doesn’t. Alexander argues that a broad-based coalition of different advocates and allies is crucial for creating change and notes that it was the uprising and the massive amount of media attention that the protests got that made a difference for these six teens accused of attempted murder for a fight at school. On the other hand, Alexander illustrates the shortcomings of the movement. Because nooses were central images in the case, these recognizable relics of “old-fashioned racism” made the case more comprehensible to people and thus easier to win. Because most people now recognize that lynching is horrific, it was easy to spot and name and react to the racism inherent in this case. However, as long as slavery- and Jim Crow-era images and language are the only recognizable signs of racism in public opinion and in courts, the more insidious forms of new racism in a colorblind world will continue to go unchecked.

To further emphasize how much work there is to be done, Alexander explores how the values of a colorblind world have infected the modern Civil Rights movement. In the same way that Obama needed to distance himself from absent Black fathers through his Father’s Day speech in order to be exemplary, leaders of the Civil Rights movement rely on the perception of respectability in order to achieve their goals. This means that they are hesitant to support abolition of the police or reform of mass incarceration, for fear of aligning themselves with Black criminals. Though understandable given the realities of systemic racism, prizing Black exceptionalism actually encourages the kind of racist thinking that these groups are working against. As long as the only Black people who are worthy of advocacy and media attention are perfect according to white standards of perfection, the full range of Black experience and humanity is denied. One need only look at media attention around white mass shooters to see that compassion and forgiveness for criminals are possible within American society, yet those mercies are continually denied to Black citizens.

In the same way that Alexander outlined how difficult it is to escape the mass incarceration system, she also illustrates how difficult it is to make meaningful change to that system. Just as a Black man who enters into a plea bargain to escape jailtime may end up ensnared in the penal system for life, so have many attempts to reform the criminal justice system served instead to strengthen that very system and make it all the more difficult to change. Alexander notes that financial factors drive much of the sticking power of this system, and like Southern planters resisted the end of slavery, so too do those who financially benefit from the prison industrial complex resist the end of mass incarceration. Alexander suggests that any coalitions for a revolution must, as Martin Luther King called for near the end of his life, extend beyond color lines. Alexander suggests that poor white people and disenfranchised Black people must join together to resist the domination of the moneyed few.

Alexander uses “The Fire This Time” as the title of the final chapter both to invoke the historical roots of the work ahead and to offer a map for that work. The title is a play on The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s 1963 nonfiction account of racism in America, and at the close of the chapter, Alexander quotes Baldwin’s essay in the form of a letter to his 14-year-old nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation. When Baldwin tells his nephew that Black America cannot be free until white America is free from their denial and delusions of innocence, it is a call for revolution, a call that Alexander conveys to her readers, too. By quoting Baldwin, who was writing from the height of the Civil Rights Movement, who was lamenting how little had changed in the century since slavery ended, Alexander suggests that we are already in the “next time” that Baldwin warned of, and, without meaningful change, America is fated to continually replicate the same systems of oppression in new forms. The map that Baldwin and Alexander offer, the map for systemic change, lies not in civil rights organizations or in criminal justice reform alone, but instead in a change of consciousness for white Americans. Until white Americans wake up to their complicity in the continued subjugation of Black Americans, the country is doomed to repeat its history.