Michelle Alexander – Contemporary Racism

Common’s New Album is Anything But

Brittany Smith — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:52:16 +0000

This week, the rapper Common released an album titled Black America Again. It’s genius. Pure activist genius, right before Election Day. His music is complex and interesting, his lyrics exploring the nuances of systemic racism in the United States. He focuses on an array of issues, including mass incarceration, the injustices occurring in Flint, Michigan, and cultural stereotypes, which marginalize people of color and perpetuate systemic inequality. “The Day Women Took Over” highlights the accomplishments ...

Disenfranchisement in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Haleigh Jacob — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:37:14 +0000

In light of the upcoming election, I think it’s important to talk a bit about the connection between disenfranchisement and mass incarceration in the United States. Since watching the 2016 Netflix documentary called 13th and reading Michelle Alexander’s fifth chapter from her book The New Jim Crow, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways mass incarceration will affect the results of the election in just a few days. Here are a few things that ...

The Significance of Social Cognition in Determining Racial Ideology

Anna Robinson — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:32:47 +0000

As I read the section entitled “The Birth and Death of Slavery” in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the key role social cognition played in creating racial ideologies became abundantly clear. As Alexander explains in her historical analysis of the creation of race in colonial America, a fledgling country had certain capitalist needs for an increase in land and an increase in labor; in order for these ...