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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnes

Lecture by Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar.  She holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.  Previously, she was the Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the Stanford Law School.

Professor Alexander will discuss her influential book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This book chronicles the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status-denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.