Institutionalized Injustice

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 2010)


Alexander provides an impassioned monograph arguing what we - if we're to be honest with ourselves - already know: the criminal justice system in this country has systemic problems that make it racially biased. And  our criminal justice system legitimizes ongoing and permanent discrimination against those that fall into its hands. In effect, we have created a new set of structures that mimic many of the effects of Jim Crow.

What I found particularly compelling was Alexander's analysis of the impact of the War on Drugs, and how a "public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown." Furthermore, court decisions have essentially given a green light to racial profiling. And what is especially fantastic about this is that African Americans engage in illegal drug behavior at no greater rate than Caucasians. And yet they are caught and punished so far disproportionately that it becomes a joke.

I might have been precisely the target audience for this book. And yet, in reading, I sometimes got caught up with things that took away from her argument. Like following footnotes to discover sources, and seeing how often the reference was another scholarly work, not the primary source itself. (And then in one case spending a whole bunch of time online trying to look up old Congressional Records in order to figure out whether the cited source attributed a quote to the correct person.) This made me cranky, which seems particularly unfair of me when you consider how few works of popular scholarship offer footnotes whatsoever. But this, I fear, is just who I am.

Give this book a shot. It broadened and deepened my understanding of the incarceration crisis in this country, and made me wonder how taking voting rights away from felons isn't a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. And so on. Excellent food for thought.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.