THE NEW JIM CROW

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness



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

Explain why e author reviews the history of slavery and the Jim Crow laws to explain the current status of the drug policies and sentencing. How does it compare?

The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated around 1830 when a white, minstrel show performer, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, blackened his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork and danced a ridiculous jig while singing the lyrics to the song, "Jump Jim Crow." Rice created this character after seeing (while traveling in the South) a crippled, elderly black man (or some say a young black boy) dancing and singing a song ending with these chorus words:

"Weel about and turn about and do jis so,

Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."

Some historians believe that a Mr. Crow owned the slave who inspired Rice's act--thus the reason for the Jim Crow term in the lyrics. In any case, Rice incorporated the skit into his minstrel act, and by the 1850s the "Jim Crow" character had become a standard part of the minstrel show scene in America. On the eve of the Civil War, the Jim Crow idea was one of many stereotypical images of black inferiority in the popular culture of the day--along with Sambos, Coons, and Zip Dandies. The word Jim Crow became a racial slur synonymous with black, colored, or Negro in the vocabulary of many whites; and by the end of the century acts of racial discrimination toward blacks were often referred to as Jim Crow laws and practices.

What point does she make about the current sentencing practice?

Remarkably the crime rate in the United States has not been very different from other western countries. Murder is considerably more common here, but that's most likely due to the availability of guns. In 1960 official crime rates in the United States, Germany, and Finland were identical. That had not changed much by 1990, but the German rate of incarceration had stayed about the same, the Finnish rate had declined to less than half and the US incarceration rate had quadrupled. In 2004 the combined violent crime and property crime rate in the US was about the same as in 1970. We need first to look more broadly at U.S. history, and second to remind ourselves that racial subordination was not primarily a matter of private arranging but essentially a matter of public policy.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don't explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America's prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and a “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the ...