Reading The New Jim Crow has been eye-opening for me. Michelle Alexander raises issues that I do not run into on a daily basis. I've learned that serious injustices still plague our American government and justice system. Although we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and learn about the Civil Rights Movement, systemic racism runs deeper than ever, unfortunately.
Only in the last five to ten pages of the book does the author begin to dive into what change needs to happen to change this unfair system. She still looks back, citing powerful words by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the writer James Baldwin to begin to express the kind of change that is needed. At least for me, the change needed feels overwhelming and at times unclear. The problems seem insurmountable, too. She says there needs to be a move away from the "model of civil rights advocacy" toward what King called a "radical restructuring of our society" (Alexander 260). How will this restructuring occur? Who will lead it? How can it happen when there are competing priorities of climate change, the economy, health care, and education? How can all of these problems be solved at once?
Alexander puts this issue on the shoulders of the younger generation, our generation. She writes, "Hopefully the new generation will be led by those who know best the brutality of the new case system--a group with greater vision, courage, and determination than the old guard can muster, trapped as they may be in an outdated paradigm" (Alexander 260). I agree that a paradigm shift is needed, but the future feels uncertain and rocky, especially this week as I write this, when even day-to-day life is disrupted, school buildings are closed to students, and the very prisoners Alexander writes about, whose lives are filled with problems, now have new worries with COVID-19 spreading throughout the "cages" where they are living in prisons from New York to North Carolina.
Readers of The New Jim Crow can no longer stand by innocently while racism runs rampant. Baldwin writes that it is the people who look the other way, who aren't affected and don't even see the racism, who are guilty because "their innocence ... constitutes the crime" (261). However, the path to solving these problems feels very long and uncertain. Alexander paraphrases King's well-known quote in which he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" (260). It does feel very long, but it's up to us to shorten it and to figure out how to do that.
Friday, April 3, 2020
The Caged Bird: Racism in America (Rhetorical)
Imagery of cages is prevalent in 2020. First there were the images of refugee children being held in cages at the border of the United States with Mexico. Then, people around the world were told to "shelter in place" with their homes becoming cage-like areas of confinement. However, Michelle Alexander uses the image of a birdcage to show how there isn't just one law or one faulty part of the system that holds African Americans back and keeps them confined. There are many bars woven together that form the cage. Therefore, there is no simple solution to this complex problem.
The reader, confronted with this strong imagery, notices that the cover of the book shows the cage of a prison cell, the bars that are grasped by two human hands. Alexander uses the comparison of a bird cage to a prison cell effectively. A person cannot easily get out of the criminal justice system, just as a bird cannot easily escape from its cage and fly free.
Alexander uses this image of the cage to draw together the many forces in society and in the criminal justice system that trap people and doom them to struggle and often to failure. She writes, "The war on drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage" (Alexander 185). The roundup is first step, the way police patrol and discriminate in communities of color, to bring African Americans into the system, even though they do not commit drug crimes at higher rates, compared to white people. This leads to conviction and formal control by the system, the second phase of bringing people of color into cages. The third and final part of building this cage is called that of "invisible punishment" (Alexander 186). This includes housing discrimination, job discrimination, custody challenges, public shaming, and more, all the result of the first two steps. Alexander writes, "They become members of an undercaste--an enormous population of predominantly black and brown people who, because of the drug war, are denied basic rights and privileges of American citizenship and are permanently relegated to an inferior status. This is the final phase, and there is no going back" (187). The systemic racism found within our criminal justice system is like a cage made of many bars, and Alexander shows how removing one bar is not enough to solve the problem. More effort is needed to remove the cage.
The imagery of this bird cage is a clear and convincing analogy for systemic racism. Alexander wonders what Martin Luther King, Jr. would think if he came back today, for example, to a city like Chicago. She believes he would be disappointed that the Civil Rights era and the work of so many activists did not remove the bars of this cage and set people free. Instead, Alexander writes, "In the few short decades since King's death, a new regime of racially disparate mass incarceration has emerged in Chicago and become the primary mechanism for racial oppression and the denial of equal opportunity" (189). Instead of racism being dismantled, it's become more entrenched. And the people who have built the bars have built a system of sneaky and underhanded laws that are racist and target African Americans without using racial terms. This is even more dangerous and hard to dismantle, but it's work that needs to be done to ensure equality.
It's hard to read this section of The New Jim Crow without thinking of Maya Angelou's poem "Caged Bird" and its hopes for the future, hopes for freedom and equality. Angelou writes:
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. (31-28)
The reader, confronted with this strong imagery, notices that the cover of the book shows the cage of a prison cell, the bars that are grasped by two human hands. Alexander uses the comparison of a bird cage to a prison cell effectively. A person cannot easily get out of the criminal justice system, just as a bird cannot easily escape from its cage and fly free.
Alexander uses this image of the cage to draw together the many forces in society and in the criminal justice system that trap people and doom them to struggle and often to failure. She writes, "The war on drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage" (Alexander 185). The roundup is first step, the way police patrol and discriminate in communities of color, to bring African Americans into the system, even though they do not commit drug crimes at higher rates, compared to white people. This leads to conviction and formal control by the system, the second phase of bringing people of color into cages. The third and final part of building this cage is called that of "invisible punishment" (Alexander 186). This includes housing discrimination, job discrimination, custody challenges, public shaming, and more, all the result of the first two steps. Alexander writes, "They become members of an undercaste--an enormous population of predominantly black and brown people who, because of the drug war, are denied basic rights and privileges of American citizenship and are permanently relegated to an inferior status. This is the final phase, and there is no going back" (187). The systemic racism found within our criminal justice system is like a cage made of many bars, and Alexander shows how removing one bar is not enough to solve the problem. More effort is needed to remove the cage.
The imagery of this bird cage is a clear and convincing analogy for systemic racism. Alexander wonders what Martin Luther King, Jr. would think if he came back today, for example, to a city like Chicago. She believes he would be disappointed that the Civil Rights era and the work of so many activists did not remove the bars of this cage and set people free. Instead, Alexander writes, "In the few short decades since King's death, a new regime of racially disparate mass incarceration has emerged in Chicago and become the primary mechanism for racial oppression and the denial of equal opportunity" (189). Instead of racism being dismantled, it's become more entrenched. And the people who have built the bars have built a system of sneaky and underhanded laws that are racist and target African Americans without using racial terms. This is even more dangerous and hard to dismantle, but it's work that needs to be done to ensure equality.
It's hard to read this section of The New Jim Crow without thinking of Maya Angelou's poem "Caged Bird" and its hopes for the future, hopes for freedom and equality. Angelou writes:
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom. (31-28)
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