Description
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals in
The New Jim Crow, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination?employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service?are suddenly legal. Featured on
The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy Now, and C-Span's
Washington Journal, the book has become an overnight phenomenon, sparking a much-needed conversation about ways in which our system of mass incarceration has come to resemble systems of racial control from a different era.