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All of Us Eat (Jim) Crow

11/6/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
You see, as I go along, I've come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can't get rid of it.
​James Jones
Author of From Here to Eternity
Born on November 6, 1921
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J. Jones

My Book World

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Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness with a new preface by the author. New York: New Press, 2020 (2010).

This book should appear at some point on the syllabus of a required course in every college or university in America. Portions of it could be taught in our high schools. Adult reading groups of all stripes should read it. The book is that important. It is that good. “In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today” (10), states Alexander.
 
The New Jim Crow, however, is not only about numbers. It is about an entire philosophy in which White people can no longer discriminate outwardly (at the end of the old Jim Crow era) so in an era of colorblindness (“I don’t mind if she’s Black.”), they resort to setting up a new form of discrimination through mass incarceration. How does it work? It begins with the War on Drugs, in 1980, with the Reagan administration. It gains momentum with Bush Senior and gains real traction with Bill Clinton and Bush Junior. Alexander claims that even some of Obama’s policies contribute harm (though he does speak out against mass incarceration). With this new policy young Black and Brown men are given long sentences for minor drug infractions. Then when they finally return to their homes (uneducated and no longer young), they are marked as felons, so for the rest of their lives they cannot vote, cannot get jobs, and wind up in a constant loop of being prisoner or permanent criminal—all for a minor drug offense. And how do White men who commit the same offenses fare? Much better, because, one learns, all these cases are adjudicated by the police, who ignore White drug crime but not Black or Brown.
 
An excellent writer, Michelle Alexander makes her case in not only a lawyerly manner (perfect syllogisms) with logic and facts but also with heavy but artful doses of thinking from the greatest African-American scholars: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King, Junior. She is rough on every one of us but in the best Tough Love tradition. There is enough blame for us all but also enough room to turn this around. It won’t be easy, she declares, but by looking at the concept of Race squarely in the eye, we can do it. And I believe her.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You

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White Rage Indeed

12/14/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
A writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.
​Shirley Jackson
Born December 14,1916

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S. Jackson

My Book World

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Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The
      Unspoken Truth of Our Racial
      Divide
. New York: Bloomsbury,
      2016.

Unspoken indeed. Professor Anderson takes readers through the long yet decisive history of White Rage. It is a history that has lain directly beneath the noses of all Americans but one that has been covered up, ignored, or outright distorted, as well. Anderson revives for readers the five primary events in US history which incite and keep alive White Rage.
 
First, following the Civil War, former Confederates refuse actually to take Reconstruction seriously, and the North ignores the South’s refusal. Two, as a direct result of this action, freed African-Americans migrate north, only to find they are no more welcome there than they have been in the South. In places, rejection is even more hostile, more vitriolic. Three, White Rage is incited with the Brown vs. Topeka decision to integrate American schools, and at least two decades are spent in fighting or rolling back provisions of this decision—making most school districts as segregated as they ever were. Four, the author delineates how Ronald Reagan’s white-rage leadership reverses, insidiously, the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s. And last, Anderson reiterates what contemporary readers have witnessed for themselves, how the election of an African-American president, Barack Obama, once again incites White Rage, a backlash that results in the questionable election of Donald Trump. 
 
Anderson’s book reinforces the recent writings of other black authors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for one. She doesn’t mention reparations, but my thinking is that our country will never be at rest, can never truly hold its head up among nations until it has, in more than a symbolic manner, attempted to make reparations to the descendants of slavery. It won’t be difficult to determine who qualifies. The government will be able to use the same visible trait it used to discriminate, and that is the color of one’s skin. Anyone with African-American lineage should qualify for funding for free education, help with daily living expenses until one is independent. Not only that, but the trillions of dollars that were accrued by this nation during slavery off the backs of black men and women, should be multiplied to, in some manner, make it up to our dark-skinned brethren. Their ancestors were captured on their native soil, mauled, maligned—treated more harshly than work animals—and the surviving generations of victims of White Rage deserve recompense. The one percent will have to pay their fair share to ensure that this happens, along with the rest of us, but it must be done. And it must be done with an amount of good will and love. The fires of White Rage must be quelled forever. Only then can our nation heal.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-34  Kentucky

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