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Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow is properly understood as a classic text on and against the regime of racist mass incarceration and criminal- (felony-) marking that arose and became deeply entrenched in the United States during the last third of the previous century. There were three key problems, however, with professor Alexander’s use of the term “Jim Crow” to describe that terrible system. even with the qualifier “new.”
The first difficulty is that the real historical Jim Crow regime of the late 19th and early 20th century was specific to the South whereas the contemporary racist mass incarceration and criminal branding regime is nationwide.
The second hitch is that the Jim Crow system was part of a productionist regime dedicated to the mass exploitation of Black labor still yoked primarily to cotton. The “new Jim Crow” is a largely post-industrial phenomenon. Its victims are mostly removed from production even before they are turned into recurrently warehoused raw material recycled in and out of a giant criminal injustice industrial complex whose subjects are not typically assigned to the production of commodities.
A third problem is that the Jim Crow system of formal segregation and political disenfranchisement applied to southern Blacks of all classes whereas the “new Jim Crow” system is imposed primarily on lower- and working-class Black Americans. The Black middle and upper classes have been…