“Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.”
— chorus of an 1828 minstrel song
“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.”
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Yeah, it’s called mass incarceration. Our jails are filled with black
and brown men and women. The number of inmates, primarily people of
color, has soared sevenfold in the last three decades, according to
Alexander, from 300,000 to more than 2 million, the largest number, by
far, in the developed world. Many millions more are on probation or
parole. And no matter what their crime, the inmates never get their
citizenship back. The stigma of being an ex-felon brands someone for
life as a second-class human being.
But even before the ex-felon label is attached, certain people —
young men of color, in particular — are targeted as society’s losers by
the police, judicial bureaucracy and prison system. They face the
possibility of police harassment, invasion of privacy and arrest, often
on the smallest pretext possible, pretty much any time they step
outside.
I live in a vital, racially and ethnically diverse Chicago
neighborhood and I watch it happen — racial profiling, the
stop-and-frisk game. This is not making my neighborhood safer. It’s
wrecking lives at enormous public expense and, of course, like the
insane war on terror, creating enemies. We don’t need a justice system
based on stereotypes and armed bullying.
Read on...