America's New Jim Crow System?

Over at the Nation, Michelle Alexander delivers an incendiary, excellent piece on what she describes as the renewed rise of a caste system in America -- one that's inescapably embedded in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Caste is an uncompromising kind of word, one that suggests a fixed stratification few in the U.S. would feel comfortable identifying with (after all, we shy away even from discussions of class). But lest you think that Alexander is exaggerating her case, she offers up a list of stark statistics that would make anyone pause.

For starters, there are more blacks under surveillance in the U.S. -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850; as she notes, a decade before the Civil War began. Meanwhile, during the 2004 election, more black men were stripped of the right to vote (the result of felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year that the 15th Amendment was ratified, thereby banning laws that denied the right to vote based on race.

The old Jim Crow system fashioned blacks into permanent second-class citizens, denying them not only voting rights, but legally discriminating against them with regards to employment, housing, education access and public benefits. Not incidentally, those happen to be exactly the conditions prisoners exiting the system face today. In some urban areas, those conditions apply to the large majority of black men, who are considered felons for life. (As Alexander notes, in the Chicago area, that figure is as high as 80%.)

What's the evidently colorblind explanation for these trends? Crime rates -- though data well establishes the fact that people who sell or consume drugs are evenly distributed across ethnic groups (and some studies show white youth are far more likely to deal drugs). Still, though, Alexander writes, the drug war has been waged "almost exclusively in poor communities of color." In some states, blacks make up fully 80% of all people sent to prison on drug charges.

The litany of facts she recites gets worse. In fact, she argues that according to many metrics, blacks in the U.S. aren't doing any better than they were when riots set U.S. cities ablaze after MLK Jr.'s assassination. Nearly 25% of blacks live below the poverty line. The black child poverty rate is even higher than it was in 1968. Unemployment among blacks this year hit a 25-year high.

Should the U.S. still be savoring the accomplishment of having elected its first black president? Of course. But while the moment may have represented a "triumph over race," as Alexander writes, considering the broader landscape, it was a comparatively shallow one.

Photo Credit: karpov the wrecked train