Image via http://moritzlaw.osu.edu

Her speech was centered around the topic of The New Jim Crow, which is the title of her new book.  She discussed ways in which the criminal justice system has taken over the job that Jim Crow and enslavement started.  Have we come so far since then?  Professor Alexander says no, in fact black men are worse off today than they were in 1850.  She skillfully integrated hard statistics about the war on drugs and the ‘get tough’ policing movement into a larger narrative about the effects of disenfranchisement laws and other policies designed to relegate criminals and felons to a lower societal caste.

Take a look at a recorded speech she made just about a year ago, which is quite similar (but not as polished) as the one she shared tonight:

If you prefer to read rather than watch, catch her over on the Huffington Post:

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years.  Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared.  Quintupled, in fact.  And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs.  Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

-The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Cover via Amazon

This is The New Jim Crow. People of color are rounded up — frequently at young ages — for relatively minor drug offenses, branded felons, and then relegated to a permanent second-class status in which they may be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and subjected to legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. Those who are lucky enough to get a job upon release from prison find that up to 100 percent of their wages may be garnished to pay fees, fines, and court costs as well as the costs of their imprisonment and accumulated child support. What, realistically, do we expect these folks to do? When those labeled felons fail under this system to make it on the outside — not surprisingly, about 70 percent fail within 3 years — we throw up our hands and wonder where they all went. Or we chastise them for being poor fathers and for failing to contribute to their families. It’s a set up. This system isn’t about crime control; it about racial control. Yes, even in the age of Obama.

-Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

Thanks to my university for bringing Professor Alexander to boldly share the truth with us!

* I had the pleasure of doing some copy editing work for the Kirwan Institute’s journal, Race/Ethnicity a few years back.  Great folks doing important work.  

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Kean, M. (2011). The difference between race and culture. Progressive Scholar blog.  Retrieved from http://progressivescholar.wordpress.com/?p=615

A lot of people confuse ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘culture’ or think they are the same thing. To address the difference, we must start at the fundamental concepts of race and culture. Race is a social construct that is used to categorize and divide people based on physical characteristics, which often leads to conflict and oppression. In short, Race is a label forced on someone based on their skin tone and physical characteristics. A person’s race is externally decided and has nothing to do with culture, intellect, ability, or personality.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, is determined by such attributes as cultural traditions, religion, ancestry, language, and beliefs. Your textbook defines ethnicity as “identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth” (Rubenstein, p. 208). Let’s consider this example. ‘Caucasian’ is considered to be a race, with particular physical characteristics attributed to Caucasians such as a narrow nose, light skin, and straight or wavy hair. Within the Caucasian race, however, you will find many different ethnicities, such as Irish, Finnish, German or French. Also within the Caucasian race, you will find many different cultures and sub-cultures such as punk, gamers, straight edge, bikers – even the military can be seen as its own culture.

Different from race, culture is a system of shared beliefs and values (also known as ‘worldviews’) that may include a shared geographic region, language, religion, spirituality, or livelihoods. Communication style and interpersonal relationships are integral aspects of culture and can vary dramatically from one culture to another. It is important to remember that everyone on earth belongs to at least one culture; not just those groups who are considered ‘civilized’. The majority of culture is unseen, below the surface. The beliefs and values that lie beneath the surface can be the most difficult to change when it is necessary.

People of the same race can have many different cultures among them, and people of the same culture can have many different races among them.
So, someone’s race is determined their physical characteristics and those of their biological family. Culture is all the ways that we express ourselves, how we interact, what we believe in spiritually, and how we perceive things. Culture is not based on physical characteristics but on a person’s way of life. Ethnicity takes into account cultural traditions, language, religion, and place of origin.

References

Banks, J. A., & Banks, C. A. (2007). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Manning, M. L., & Baruth, L. G. (2009). Multicultural education of children and adolescents (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Rubenstein, J.M. (2011). The cultural landscape: An introduction to human geography (10th ed.). Prentice Hall.

Check out this video called “The Geography of the Recession” by LaToya Egwuekwe – it is an amazing, and also frightening examination of the rising unemployment rate since the beginning of this recession. On the map, check out the key – yellow is low unemployment, orange and red are medium, and purple is very high unemployment. Let me know your thoughts on the video!

Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question:

Image via Wikipedia

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Diamond realized that Yali’s question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history — the roots of global inequality.

Why were Europeans the ones with all the cargo? Why had they taken over so much of the world, instead of the native people of New Guinea? How did Europeans end up with what Diamond terms the agents of conquest: guns, germs and steel? It was these agents of conquest that allowed 168 Spanish conquistadors to defeat an Imperial Inca army of 80,000 in 1532, and set a pattern of European conquest which would continue right up to the present day.

Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter-gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent — and far more resourceful. Their lives were tough, and it seemed a terrible paradox of history that these extraordinary people should be the conquered, and not the conquerors.

To examine the reasons for European success, Jared realized he had to peel back the layers of history and begin his search at a time of equality – a time when all the peoples of the world lived in exactly the same way.

To get a little philosophical, I want to pose some questions: Is conquest necessarily a good thing?  Why was it important for a country like Britain to have a massive empire – in other words, why is expansion necessary to be seen as “thriving”?  Can’t a country or nation thrive without colonizing other places?  

Some of these European powers included the Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire, French Empire, and British Empire. In addition to the negative effects on the indigenous cultures, the European demand for labor in its new colonies is what prompted the African enslavement system across the Atlantic. This devastating holocaust had a hard-hitting and long-lasting affect on Africa and Africans. The enslavement caused a depopulation, societal disruption and destruction of Africa, especially West Africa; a loss of youth and skilled personnel; and economic devastations among other repercussions.

Some positive aspects of colonialism are: technological advancements, medical advances and new institutions in the colonized area. Some negative aspects include: spread of diseases, social oppression and exploitation, enslavement and genocide of the natives by the colonizers. Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

If you’d like to learn more here are some resources:
The impact of the slave trade on Africa by Elikia M’bokolo

Slavery in Africa

Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis by Tunde Obadina

My answer is too long for 140 characters…..

I see privilege as having multiple levels.  There is systemic privilege that I have because I live in a culture where European-American people dominate the media, business, real estate, banking, and education. Everywhere I go I see people who look like me, products that are designed for my skin tone and hair texture.  When I walk into a business I am less likely to be assumed to be a drug user, a criminal, a thug, or -insert negative stereotype here-.  I am assumed to be at least somewhat intelligent & capable just because I’m white. I feel that there is very little I can do in my day-to-day existence that rejects this systemic privilege.  It is infused through everything I do and see as a European-American in a culture dominated by European-American standards and ideals.

Then there is individual privilege, and what one chooses to do with it. Most European-Americans are blissfully unaware that they even have privilege; they see themselves succeeding and assume it is solely because of their hard work and sacrifice. The problem with this is that it gives an unrealistic view of oppressed groups and it ignores the centuries of policies and laws that were solely advantageous to white people.

Having white privilege has allowed me to be educated in private schools and maintain a good GPA even though I didn’t try very hard. It has probably gotten me into more than one job that I wasn’t completely qualified for. I have never been stopped for ‘driving while white’, and I’ve never had a problem finding greeting cards, toys, or hair care products that reflect my identity. These are things I cannot individually change; I can only be aware and educate others.

So how do I reject my privilege?  I reject it by speaking out when people make racist comments.  I reject it by acknowledging that my culture, my physical characteristics, and my language are not superior to anyone else’s. I reject it by believing a person of color when they tell me they’ve experienced discrimination. I reject it by pursuing a career where I educate young people about systems of oppression and privilege. I reject it by reminding myself that I got where I am today not because I’m a super genius but because the system was created so that I would succeed and others would not. I reject it by valuing the voices of people of color, by acknowledging that they have said everything I could ever say about white privilege and oppression (and much more eloquently than I could), and being okay with the fact that people of color need their own safe space that I am not allowed into.

Off the cuff, that’s how I reject my privilege.

The full post is worth the read, but here’s some highlights:

As one can imagine in our cis-centric* society, the family has received an enormous amount of criticism and little praise for their parenting choices. They have been accused of making their baby in to a “social experiment”, of “borderline child abuse”, and “being amoral hippies” in commentary from a multitude of sources. This fire storm of controversy and personal accusation have all come in the name of the “the good of the baby”.

But it’s hard for me to believe that any of this criticism can be counted on as being intellectually honest or in the interest of Storm.  Storm and zir’s parents are experiencing what trans people are well used to, namely, they’re receiving criticism that is not about Storm at all. Instead, Storm and zir parents are being used by cis people as foils for their own personal conflicts, confusion and stereotypes about gender and gender relations.

Socialization can come in good and bad forms. For example many kids today are socialized in to racist ideology and behavior. Yet we don’t talk about the evils of that kind of socialization because it would challenge white supremacy prevalent in American society. And in this case, we don’t hear about objections over gender socialization until people are giving their children the free will in a challenge to cis-supremacy.

And our normative gender relations and stereotyping have an enormous political agenda, namely in defending patriarchy, heterosexism and cis-supremacy to the bitter end.

 

*Here’s a quick explanation (paraphrased from this source)

‘Cis’ is an abbreviated version of ‘cisgender’ or ‘cissexual’, i.e. the opposite of ‘transgender’ or ‘transsexual’.

‘Cisgender’ means those whose identity and sense of themselves is aligned with the sex/gender they were born with. They have no sense of ‘bodily dissonance’ that trans people experience.

So cis-centric has the same function as heteronormativity, the insistence on straight orientation being the ‘default’ and anything else being the ‘other’.

If our society is ciscentric, it is because it assumes cis people are normal while trans people are abnormal.