How White People Became White
I am here to do some truth telling!” So declared Michelle Alexander in Chicago on March 17, 2011, at a Roosevelt University-sponsored event featuring her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Since its publication in 2010, Ms. Alexander has made the rounds of television, radio and web appearances. But neither her book nor her media blitz adequately convey the intensity and passion that this young legal scholar and self-described “racial justice advocate” brings to her subject in person. Her focus is on a centuries-old wrong perpetrated against all peoples of color, but particularly against Black men – their mass roundup, imprisonment, and lifetime relegation to second class citizenship status thereafter.
Of course, Alexander is far from first to chronicle the American penal system’s attempts to neutralize, if not destroy, the Black community. She writes in the wake of not a few stalwarts – from the incisive pen of James Baldwin and Malcolm X’s fire-breathing oratory, to the persistent, clarion call for justice by and on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal; and from the public intellectualism of Cornell West and the late Manning Marable, to the tireless educative and organizational work of long time Black Power and anti-war and feminist Angela Davis, among many others. Alexander’s contribution to this body of protest literature and tradition is important not because she presents any novel ideas. Rather, for the first time, she meticulously lays bare the
