The Civil Rights Lawyer, Michelle Alexander, is one of the people who is waking us up to

history we don't remember, and structures most of us can't fathom intending to create.

Mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, these are short handways of talking

about human wreckage decades on from policies that began during the Nixon administration

in the wake of civil rights advances in the name of reestablishing order.

More people of color were swept into the criminal justice system, as war was waged on drug

crimes which were largely ignored when committed by middle or upper class whites.

Michelle Alexander calls the punitive culture that has emerged the new Jim Crow, and she

is making this visible in the name of a fierce hope and a conviction that across the differences

in this land we not only can but already are, rising to the transformation to which it calls.

The press of our daily lives can make it difficult to imagine alternatives and to commit

ourselves to even small steps towards building a movement that might have some hope of

being truly transformational.

But all over the country right now, people are actually doing that work in faith communities,

in reentry centers, in schools on campuses, on street corners and barbershops today.

We're all asking questions that haven't been asked in a long time and saying, we don't

want to live in a prison state.

How are we going to go about building a movement that can birth something new?

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being.

Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University.

She published the new Jim Crow Mass incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in 2010 and it's

gradually become a phenomenon, a source of national discussion and reflection.

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