Mateo, a student in Kathleen’s class in San Francisco, has this to say about Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
I extremely enjoyed this book, and I admired Michelle Alexander’s courage to raise issues that are plaguing our society.
Alexander goes in depth about the prison industrial complex, in which we continue to see black men incarcerated for drug crimes. She states statistics that show that white men actually use and sell drugs at astronomical rates, but still black men are being imprisoned.
Alexander concludes that we are in “The New Jim Crow Era.” Many people feel as though we are no longer fighting against explicit racism; however, with the incarceration rates of young Black men, it shows people of color are still being “tamed.”
Alexander’s passion for and knowledge of the Prison Industrial Complex really inspired me to raise these same issues to people who are ignorant to the injustices people of color are facing.
Readers: If you’ve read The New Jim Crow, please leave a comment for Mateo. What did you think of the book?