52+2 Deck Draw #5: THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS by Michelle Alexander ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed.”

Thanks to the documentary ‘13th’, I and hopefully much of the country who weren’t already aware of disproportionate incarceration and the many layers of inequality in the justice system were exposed to the problem. This book came out thirteen years ago, six before ‘13th’, and I bought it amidst the 2020 protests with a list of other related titles, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which is quoted in the last chapter and is a must read. I’m embarrassingly late to reading this after letting it sit on the shelf for three years, finally putting it in the 52+2 deck so I’d have no more chances to pass it by again. Then I drew it right before the Tyre Nichols video came out, and I was given another infuriating reason to pick it up when I shouldn’t have been waiting for any.

I’m not sure if Michelle Alexander was the first to find a wider audience in discussing social castes and the way slavery and Jim Crow have found a descendent in modern-day imprisonment, but she certainly did so thoroughly and accessibly. We still don’t have it right thirteen years later, and I worry daily that we are moving backward, not forward. As she mentions toward the end of the book, it will take a complete change in societal thinking to fix things, not just a few legal victories or another black president. In a year when states are fighting to remove courses on African American history from curriculums, we need that change just as much as we did three, thirteen, and thirty years ago.

I learned most of what I know now about the history of inequality from this and The Color of Law, and highly recommend anything by James Baldwin for a personal and eloquent perspective on the civil rights movement. It feels only right to be revisiting the topic in February, and I think it’s more than time I start doing so every February in the future.