The Arc of Justice (Final Thoughts)

     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group with greater vision, courage, and determination than the old guard can muster, trapped as they may be in an outdated paradigm" (Alexander 260).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.