Hannah Golden | Freelance reporter
There was only standing room available in the Lillis auditorium Tuesday night. Michelle Alexander discussed her new book in the first lecture of the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2012 series “Human Being; Being Human.”
Alexander’s bestseller “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” has been featured on countless TV talk shows and stations, receiving wild praise for its insights exposing the racial discrimination prevalent in the United States criminal justice system.
Alexander, formerly a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, is a civil rights lawyer and activist. She has spent the last few years as a professor at various universities including Stanford.
According to Alexander, while the Obamas provide a positive image for black people in the United States, the rest of the minority population are not taken so kindly.
“Drive a few blocks from the White House and you discover the other America,” Alexander said.
While doing away with Jim Crow laws eliminated the obvious racism, the war on drugs has rendered discrimination just as prevalent. Mass incarceration, Alexander believes, is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow laws.
Alexander’s research into the problem of mass incarceration in America began with her discovering the “Drug Task Force”— a group of Oakland police officers who were accused of planting drugs on suspects and beating them.
She calls mass incarceration a “numbers game,” as some law enforcement officers have been given huge bonuses for the volume of “offenders” they pull off the streets.
Alexander believes the problem stems from a political agenda, “The Southern Strategy,” in which politicians aim to appeal to working-class whites that feel threatened by racial equality.
The United States holds the highest incarceration rate in the world. This rate has quintupled in the last 30 years, and while the rate for whites has been consistent, that of blacks has skyrocketed.
Adding to this, having a felony record can have huge negative impacts on a person’s life, denying a person access to housing, public benefits, jobs and voting rights.
Alexander calls for an “awakening” to this issue and for Americans to begin to approach felons with compassion, building a modern version of an underground railroad to help them out of the devastation that having a record implies.
“We have not ended racial caste in America,” Alexander said. “We have merely redesigned it.”