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

Alexander explores the history of “racialized social control” (20) in the United States. During the early colonial period of the 17th century, indentured servitude was the dominant form of labor. White and Black bondsmen occupied a similar socioeconomic rung far below wealthy lords, plantation owners, and other elites who heaped equal scorn on laborers of all races. This system began to unravel in 1675, when Nathaniel Bacon, a white landowner in Jamestown, Virginia, staged a rebellion against the colony’s planter elite that united enslaved people, indentured servants, and poor whites. Although the rebellion ultimately collapsed, it struck fear in the hearts of wealthy planters who endeavored to drive a wedge between poor white and Black laborers to prevent future uprisings. Rather than rely on English-speaking enslaved people from the West Indies, planters began to import people from Africa who were less familiar with European languages and customs, and therefore less likely to commiserate with white laborers. By opening expatriated Indian lands to poor whites and empowering them to form slave patrols and militias, the elite effectively offered poor whites what Alexander refers to as a “racial bribe” (42), the first of many in American history.

Having established race as the dominant social and economic division in colonial America, the country’s founding elite went on to enshrine these divisions in the US Constitution. The electoral college was a compromise designed in part to grant Southern states greater political power which they would use to perpetuate the institution of slavery over the next 70 years. So too was the Three-Fifths Clause, which allowed enslaved people to contribute to a state’s overall population count to apportion seats in Congress without granting them the right to vote. Given the rhetorical importance the founders placed on liberty and equal rights, the dual myths of white supremacy and Black inferiority were a way to reconcile the inherent contradiction between lofty Enlightenment ideals and the legal protections afforded to chattel slavery by the US Constitution.

Although slavery was finally abolished at the end of the Civil War, the philosophy that justified it—white supremacy—endured. According to Alexander, abolition ushered in a chaotic period of transition during which Southern whites sought to establish a new apparatus of racialized social control to replace slavery. This was important to the planter elites who required a form of cheap labor, and to poor whites whose skin color was a psychological totem of superiority.

Meanwhile, the Reconstruction era between 1865 and 1877 marked what Alexander calls a “brief but extraordinary period of black advancement” (36). The 14th and 15th Amendments stipulated that Black Americans receive equal treatment under the law and the right to vote, respectively; the Enforcement Acts empowered the federal government to combat the Ku Klux Klan more effectively; and an expanded Freedman’s Bureau helped supply formerly enslaved people with forms of public assistance, including housing, food, and education. Just five years after the Civil War, 15% of Southern elected officials were Black. To emphasize the profound nature of this achievement, Alexander points out that in 1980, that figure was only 8%.

By 1877, however, the federal government largely abandoned this ambitious project of Black advancement when it withdrew troops from the South. Without this military presence, so-called Redeemer legislators in the South were free to pass a series of grossly discriminatory statutes. States enforced laws against vagrancy and other vaguely identified activities like “mischief” disproportionately against formerly enslaved people, creating a huge number of Black prisoners. Through the practice of convict leasing, these prisoners were often put to work on plantations under circumstances and conditions not unlike slavery.

Convict leasing eventually phased out by the early 20th century as public opinion soured on the practice. Meanwhile, the planter elite faced enormous anxieties over a growing Populist movement that threatened to unite poor white and Black Americans in the fight for economic equality. Another racial bribe was in order, and this time it took the form of segregation laws designed to drive a wedge between white and Black members of the underclass. Particularly after 1896, the year the Supreme Court upheld segregation laws in Plessy v. Ferguson, these so-called Jim Crow laws—supposedly named for a character in a minstrel show—proliferated across the American South. For over a half-century, Black Southerners remained in a state of “racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries” (43).

While many scholars point to Brown v. Board of Education—the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case prohibiting state-sanctioned segregation—as the end of the Jim Crow era, Alexander takes a more complicated view. Already by the 1950s, Jim Crow’s racial caste system was showing cracks, partly due to the growing political power of Black Americans who migrated North and organized into groups like the NAACP. Alexander also points to the national embarrassment of Americans having fought World War II to rid Europe of racist Nazi ideology, only to return to their own racial caste system at home.

At the same time, the legal implications of Brown hardly swept over the American South overnight. On the contrary, Southerners met this development with defiance and often violent outrage. The Ku Klux Klan reemerged as a major terrorist threat, castrating and killing Black men and bombing Black churches and homes. A massive network of white supremacists known as the White Citizens’ Councils materialized to oppose segregation and voter registration drives through acts of intimidation. To highlight the effectiveness of this resistance movement, Alexander points out that in 1958, only 13 school systems were desegregated in the South.

Ensuring the end of Jim Crow required a massive grassroots social justice movement alongside political action from both Congress and the president. In response to widespread protests and boycotts led by activists like Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy delivered a strong civil rights bill to Congress in 1963. This vision was fulfilled by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was instrumental in rallying congressional votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which formally dismantled the Jim Crow system in the South.

As before, this increase in Black enfranchisement threatened to strike a new alliance between poor white and Black Americans. Indeed, before his assassination in 1968, King planned to oversee the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement into a “Poor People’s Movement” (49) that would unite disadvantaged whites, Blacks, Latinxs, and Native Americans. And as before, conservative elites sought to stymie this alliance by creating a new system of racialized social control. The challenge this time would be to find a way to build and enforce this social order in a manner that was plausibly race-neutral. One of the biggest legacies of the Civil Rights Movement was that Americans became far less likely to tolerate overt racism from their elected leaders. Thus, instead of explicitly decrying integration and miscegenation, many politicians sought to appeal to white Southern voters through calls for “law and order” (50).

Alexander writes that such rhetoric would have been familiar to Southern whites, whose elected officials had long tied desegregation efforts to lawlessness. Bolstering this narrative was an unfortunate but very real rise in national crime rates that coincided with the era of civil rights reform. Alexander attributes this rise to the postwar baby boom and a broader demographic and cross-racial increase in the number of young men, who are historically responsible for committing the most crime. Thus, Southern whites were particularly susceptible to the kind of implicitly racialized “tough on crime” (52) rhetoric of politicians like 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and 1968 Republican presidential candidate and eventual winner Richard Nixon. Referred to by Nixon operatives as the Southern Strategy, this rhetoric accelerated a party realignment already underway, dividing the alliance of poor Southern whites and Black Americans that formed within the Democratic Party in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms of the 1930s.

Given the Republican Party’s growing animosity toward social welfare programs, a key component of law-and-order rhetoric involved painting the recipients of public benefits as lazy or undeserving. Urban crime, conservatives argued, was a consequence of culture—presumably Black culture—rather than a consequence of debilitating poverty, as Democrats argued. Thus, by exploiting fears of Black criminals collecting welfare checks at the expense of hardworking whites, the Republican Party solved its central political dilemma: how to convince poor and working-class voters to support a party aligned with corporations and wealthy conservatives.

While Goldwater and Nixon laid the rhetorical groundwork for this project, it was under President Ronald Reagan that the new racial caste system came into full effect. Nixon may have coined the phrase “War on Drugs,” but little changed at the policy level until Reagan. On the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan masterfully employed racial dog whistles like “welfare queens” and “predators” to pass along racist messaging while retaining plausible deniability if attacked by liberals. His tough-on-crime rhetoric was so effective that Reagan attracted 22% of the Democratic vote, handily defeating President Jimmy Carter. Then in 1982, though fewer than 2% of Americans considered drugs a serious national issue, Reagan launched his own War on Drugs, one that was very real and not merely rhetorical.

According to Alexander, between 1981 and 1991, the FBI increased funding for antidrug initiatives from $38 million to $181 million; the Department of Defense increased antidrug funding from $33 million to over $1 billion; so too did DEA antidrug funding pass the $1 billion mark during that period. These increases coincided with dramatic declines in public health and education expenditures related to drug abuse. To justify this spending to an American public little concerned about drugs, the government launched a massive media campaign that emphasized the supposed severity of the drug problem and cast Black men as dangerous criminals.

While America embarked on a racially focused drug war, urban Black communities suffered an economic collapse fueled by globalization, deindustrialization, and technological change. As urban factories closed and the computer revolution continued apace, Black adults who attended poorly funded segregated schools found themselves locked out of the new economy. Black men especially suffered, given that they reaped fewer of the benefits of the expansion of service industry jobs than Black women did. Three years after the announcement of Reagan’s drug war, crack cocaine swept through inner-city communities, causing devastating spikes in both addiction and violence associated with the drug trade.

Rather than respond to the crack crisis by treating it as a public health disaster, the Reagan administration seized it as an opportunity to intensify the War on Drugs. In 1986 Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which included mandatory minimum sentences for distributing cocaine and harsher sentencing guidelines for distributing crack versus powder cocaine, an undeniably racialized policy given the association between crack and Black culture propped up by the media in recent years. The legislation also demanded the involvement of the US military in the War on Drugs and even allowed the use of illegally obtained evidence to convict drug criminals. Another piece of legislation passed two years later mandated five-year sentences for first-time possession charges with no intent to sell. It also permitted landlords to evict tenants if they believed drug use took place on the premises. To illustrate the extent to which the Reagan administration exploited the crack crisis, Alexander quotes one observer who said at the time, “One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it” (67).

By the 1990s, Democrats—fearful of being perceived as soft on crime—began to engage in the same racially coded rhetoric and draconian drug policies as Republicans. This was particularly the case with President Bill Clinton. She writes, “Clinton—more than any other president—created the current racial undercaste” (72). He did so not only by escalating the War on Drugs with his extraordinarily punitive 1994 Crime Bill but also by dismantling social welfare programs like the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Its replacement, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), prohibited those convicted of a drug felony from receiving welfare and food stamps, among other limitations. According to the author, the motive behind these welfare cuts was not fiscal conservatism, as some suggest. Rather, the federal government redirected the money it spent on affordable housing to build prisons for all these new individuals convicted of drug felonies.