The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

By Michelle Alexander; Cornel West (Introduction by)
(New Press, The, Paperback, 9781595586438, 336pp.)

Publication Date: January 2012

Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover

Categories: Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General, Discrimination & Racism, Penology

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the March 2010 Indie Notables

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded the national campaign against racial profiling. At the beginning of her career she served as a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court for Justice Harry Blackmun. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio.

Michelle Alexander says that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of blacks in the war on drugs. More at NPR.org

Devastating. . . . Alexander does a fine job of truth-telling, pointing a finger where it rightly should be pointed: at all of us, liberal and conservative, white and black.
—Forbes

Alexander is absolutely right to fight for what she describes as a “much-needed conversation” about the wide-ranging social costs and divisive racial impact of our
criminal-justice policies.
—Newsweek

Invaluable . . . a timely and stunning guide to the labyrinth of propaganda, discrimination, and racist policies masquerading under other names that comprises what we call justice in America.
—Daily Kos

Many critics have cast doubt on the proclamations of racism’s erasure in the Obama era, but few have presented a case as powerful as Alexander’s.
—In These Times

Carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable.
—Publishers Weekly

[Written] with rare clarity, depth, and candor.
—Counterpunch

A call to action for everyone concerned with racial justice and an important tool for anyone concerned with understanding and dismantling this oppressive system.
—Sojourners

Undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.
—Birmingham News