Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)

After a long break from work, I returned to work to find a bit of turmoil caused by a co-worker's sudden departure. I cannot go into details here for various reasons, but I am saddened by how bitter and hostile the whole episode has made everyone in my organization.

We are ostensibly advocating for a different kind of society, one with more fairness, mercy, and hope than the one we currently live in. However, the way this episode played out betrays how deeply mired in our current world-view we all are. Despite our ideals, we again sought self-interest and assumed the worst in those that acted against us.

Against this backdrop, my executive director handed me an advance copy of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which went on sale today. Among those working in the reentry field, the author's central argument is nothing new—that the current regime of mass incarceration is functionally equivalent to slavery and Jim Crow. And it describes the familiar feeling of inevitability and hopelessness that such an insight invariably causes in those sensitive to the cause: "If racial inequality and oppression perseveres through transformation, what good is it to fight against it?"

If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation's borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in American. Inevitably, a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that America's current racial caste system is its last.

Indeed. I agree wholeheartedly with her assessment of what it takes to dismantle the new Jim Crow—nothing short of a fundamental change in our culture, i.e. cultivation of "an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being." And such a change is not won in courts or through law. It is won person by person, by each of us living that life of "genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being" at every moment of our lives, with every person we meet. And so I am saddened that my organization failed to live up to that new ethic this time.