Ten Years After “The New Jim Crow”

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Barack, Washington, Wickenden, News, Obama, Politics, Wnyc, Lizza, President

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But, until the publication of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow,” in 2010, most people didn’t use the term mass incarceration, or consider the practice a social-justice issue. Alexander argued that the increasing imprisonment of black and brown men—through rising arrest rates and longer sentences—was not merely a response to crime but a system of racial control. “The drug war was in part a politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil-rights movement, but it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fuelled by media portrayals of drug users,” Alexander tells David Remnick. “Those racial stereotypes were resonant of the same stereotypes of slaves and folks during the Jim Crow era.”

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven
0:06.4	hospitality company that offers intimate world life encounters in extraordinary remote landscapes.
0:12.5	Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other
0:18.2	to Namibia, where the expert guides delivered a truly once-in-a-lifetime
0:23.6	experience. I promise you, whatever you watch and see before you go won't prepare you for the thrill
0:29.4	of a wilderness adventure. eBay, it's a place to fall in love with new pre-loved vintage and rare
0:36.6	fashion over and over again.
0:39.0	Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated.
0:42.5	Yeah, eBay.
0:44.0	Things people love.
0:48.4	I'm Dorothy Wickendon.
0:49.9	On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remneck talks with Michelle Alexander, whose best-selling
0:56.4	book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, was published
1:02.1	a decade ago. The book helped make prison reform a part of the national political debate.
1:09.8	When the New Jim Crow came out a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for the person I was 10 years ago.
1:16.5	So take me back to those times, to that Michelle Alexander and the work you were doing for the ACLU.
1:22.7	What were you finding out?
1:24.7	So that would have been 20 years ago from today. And back during those years, I was working as a
1:35.2	civil rights lawyer, and I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal justice system, and that bias pervaded all of our political,
1:48.0	social and economic systems. That's why I was a civil rights lawyer. But what I didn't understand
1:53.6	was that a new system of racial and social control had been born again in America, a system eerily reminiscent
2:03.5	to those that we had left behind. In fact, you know, I was heading to work my first day at the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.