The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or labelled felons for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a permanent, second-class status - much like their grandparents before them, who lived under an explicit system of control.

In this stunning and incisive critique, civil rights lawyer-turned-legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America; we have simply redesigned it.

Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the war on drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control. In the current era, it is no longer permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification of discrimination., exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. 

The old forms of discrimination -- discrimination of employment, housing, education, and public benefits, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal once you've been named a felon.

Alexander challenges the civil rights community, and all of us, to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

Former ACLU-NC Racial Justice Project Director Michelle Alexander now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.