The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, Alexander identifies clear patterns in how these systems are built, maintained, dismantled, and eventually transformed into something new. Each system arose as a way of dividing white and Black members of the poor and working classes to limit their political power and protect the economic power of elites. Thus, whenever these systems are dismantled—as they were during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement—those same elites scramble to set a new racial caste in place, one that is better tailored for the era in question. For example, at the end of the Civil War, the wealthy planter class required a labor class to complete the backbreaking work once done by enslaved people. Initially, it looked to convict leasing, a practice not unlike mass incarceration by which Black Southerners were targeted disproportionately by vagrancy laws and other racially motivated statutes, then forced to work on plantations under conditions not unlike slavery. This proved to be a stop-gap measure, as public opinion quickly soured on a gambit that so closely resembled slavery, which so many Americans fought to eliminate. Moreover, Southern elites had to contend with a growing Populist movement that increasingly sought to unite white and Black laborers into a potentially powerful political coalition.

A more enduring solution came in the form of a new racial caste system: Jim Crow. Given that racism was already rampant in the American South, it was not difficult to build a new narrative of white supremacy centered not on slavery but on the righteousness of the Southern cause during the Civil War and the legal subjugation of the Black race. This appealed particularly to white Southerners’ humiliation at losing what they soon came to call the War of Northern Aggression, as if the Confederacy itself hadn’t launched an insurrection on behalf of slavery. By segregating Southern society, relegating Black communities to second-class citizenry, and enabling organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate and terrorize those communities, Jim Crow constituted yet another racial bribe to whites, one uniquely suited to the cultural tenor of the era. Racism adapted.

This racial caste system persisted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 formally dismantled Jim Crow. Thanks to an ambitious grassroots mobilization led by individuals like Martin Luther King Jr., America reached a new consensus that explicitly racial political speech would no longer be tolerated. Thus, for certain political elites to once again divide the nation along racial lines in service of a new caste system, racism would have to adapt again, this time to a putatively colorblind nation. So in a tradition that began with Richard Nixon, escalated with Ronald Reagan, and reached full fruition with Bill Clinton, politicians sought to divide white and Black America through the coded rhetoric of law-and-order politics. Of course, rhetoric alone cannot create a new caste system. Thus, the War on Drugs was born. Not only that, but a concerted propaganda effort combined with vast federal incentives all but ensured that Black men would be the ones most targeted by police and prosecutors.

Given the proven adaptability of racism in America and the extent to which mass incarceration is built on a foundation of colorblindness, Alexander insists that criminal justice reformers ensure that race is central to their efforts and rhetoric. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and the new caste system that emerges to replace the old one may be even more durable. Already, Alexander notes in the Preface to the 2020 edition, the system of mass incarceration can be seen morphing into a system of mass detention and deportation targeting Latinx immigrants.

In the years following the Civil Rights Movement, Americans were no longer willing to tolerate explicitly racial speech from their political leaders. The days of George Wallace proclaiming “Segregation forever!” (50) were replaced by a vocabulary of coded rhetoric designed to appeal to racial prejudices while preserving plausible deniability for the speaker.

Yet as mass incarceration escalated, it became clear that this was no flaw in the new racial caste system but a defining feature. By justifying disproportionate racial outcomes in traffic stops, arrests, and sentencing in strictly race-neutral terms, it created the illusion that mass incarceration was something other than a form of racial control. In a way this makes mass incarceration a more durable form of racial caste than either slavery or Jim Crow. There is no question that both slavery and Jim Crow were systems of explicit racial control, and so as public opinion shifted on abolition and desegregation, respectively, these systems eventually crumbled. Though most Americans would likely reject the creation and continuation of a new racial caste after Jim Crow, the race-neutral rhetoric of mass incarceration blinds them to what it really is. Alexander sees it as a grim reflection of a colorblind nation when Americans, who would likely renounce a criminal justice system in which 100% of the drug criminals are Black, are willing to accept a system in which only 90% of the drug criminals in some states are Black. She also argues that this denial is unintentionally exacerbated by affirmative action, which helps elevate a small number of exceptional Black men and women as tokens of racial progress. She writes, “We have become blind, not so much to race, but to the existence of racial caste in America” (300).

Even today, bipartisan calls to downsize prisons and alleviate the negative consequences associated with the prison label are often couched in race-neutral terms. For many, transforming the criminal justice system is a worthy effort simply because of its extraordinary costs, its questionable success at deterring crime, and the needless human suffering it causes—all good reasons to address the issue. Yet Alexander is emphatic that unless criminal justice reform is done in a way that acknowledges the system as a form of social control, another racial caste system will simply emerge in its place. For that reason, Alexander sees a silver lining to the election of Donald Trump, whom she views as having accelerated the end of colorblindness through racial demagoguery.