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)