The New Jim Crow_ Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander [120]
The same is true in the drug war. Laws prohibiting the use and sale of drugs are facially race neutral, but they are enforced in a highly discriminatory fashion. The decision to wage the drug war primarily in black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African Americans but not whites on freeways and train stations has had precisely the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era. A facially race-neutral system of laws has operated to create a racial caste system.
Other differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration are actually more significant than they may initially appear. An example relates to the role of racial stigma in our society. As discussed in chapter 4, during Jim Crow, racial stigma contributed to racial solidarity in the black community. Racial stigma today, however—that is, the stigma of black criminality—has turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of the people most affected by it.57 The implications of this difference are profound. Racial stigma today makes collective action extremely difficult—sometimes impossible; whereas racial stigma during Jim Crow contained the seeds of revolt.
Described below are a number of the other important differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Listing all of the differences here is impractical; so instead we will focus on a few of the major differences that are most frequently cited in defense of mass incarceration, including the absence of overt racial hostility, the inclusion of whites in the system of control, and African American support for some “get tough” policies and drug war tactics.
Absence of racial hostility. First, let’s consider the absence of overt racial hostility among politicians who support harsh drug laws and the law enforcement officials charged with enforcing them. The absence of overt racial hostility is a significant difference from Jim Crow, but it can be exaggerated. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, was born of racial opportunism—an effort by white elites to exploit the racial hostilities, resentments, and insecurities of poor and working-class whites. Moreover, racial hostility and racial violence have not altogether disappeared, given that complaints of racial slurs and brutality by the police and prison guards are fairly common. Some scholars and commentators have pointed out that the racial violence once associated with brutal slave masters or the Ku Klux Klan has been replaced, to some extent, by violence perpetrated by the state. Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality, solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the death penalty.58
But even granting that some African Americans may fear the police today as much as their grandparents feared the Klan (as a wallet can be mistaken for a gun) and that the penal system may be as brutal in many respects as Jim Crow (or slavery), the absence of racial hostility in the public discourse and the steep decline in vigilante racial violence is no small matter. It is also significant that the “whites only” signs are gone and that children of all colors can drink from the same water fountains, swim in the same pools, and play on the same playgrounds. Black children today can even dream of being president of the United States.
Those who claim that mass incarceration is “just like” Jim Crow make a serious mistake. Things have changed. The fact that a clear majority of Americans were telling pollsters in the early 1980s—when the drug war was kicking off—that they opposed race discrimination in nearly all its forms should not be dismissed