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  • The Influence of Past Racism on Criminal Injustice: A Review of The New Jim Crow and The Condemnation of Blackness
  • Jelani Jefferson Exum (bio)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness. By Michelle Alexander. New York: The New Press. 2010.
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. By Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2010.

There are books that, on their own, are informative and moving. But, oftentimes, reading books together—one right after the other—compounds each works’ transformative power. Michelle Alexander’s much-needed report (calling it simply a book hardly does it justice), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, can certainly stand on its own as an important statement about the current use of mass incarceration to maintain a racial caste system in the United States. The same strength can be found in The Condemnation [End Page 143] of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s account of the connection of blackness to criminality in this country. Each book, on its own, gives readers a greater understanding of the racism within the criminal justice system. However, reading them jointly paints a disturbing picture of the past and present use of incarceration and crime rhetoric in America and leaves one with an overwhelming sense of injustice and the data to know that the injustice is real.

I was asked to review both books, and so I read them back to back—The New Jim Crow first, and The Condemnation of Blackness second. I did not think much about the order in which I read the books, and I suppose that it may have made more sense for me to have read them in the reverse of the order that I chose. The Condemnation of Blackness makes the case for the idea of black criminality being created during the making of urban America. It focuses on the history of American cities and the treatment and view of blacks in those cities. While The New Jim Crow looks to history as well, its purpose is to liken the country’s current system of mass incarceration to the Jim Crow caste system of old. Therefore, in a chronological sense, The Condemnation of Blackness sets the historical stage for the discussion that takes place in The New Jim Crow. However, my unintentional mis-ordering of the books (I simply picked up one first and began reading it) made the reading less of a history lesson, and more of an insight into the unsettling character of the black face of crime in America. Starting this journey with The New Jim Crow makes a reader deeply question whether the high rates of incarceration in the United States could indeed be a determined effort to maintain blacks as an underclass. Following that reading with The Condemnation of Blackness, opens one’s eyes to the persistent effort throughout America’s history to attach criminality to blackness, making the claim made in The New Jim Crow seem, not only plausible, but hard to doubt. In concert, the two books expose the enormously disquieting power of the criminal justice system over the past, present, and future of an entire group of Americans.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander makes the claim that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” using the criminal justice system and colorblind rhetoric (2). In building her argument, she begins with the lineage of Jarvious Cotton, a black man who cannot vote due to his status as a felon on parole (NJC1 1). What is interesting about Cotton’s history is that his great-great-grandfather was a slave who could not vote; his great-grandfather was killed by the Ku Klux Klan for trying to vote; Klan intimidation stopped his grandfather from attempting to vote; and poll taxes and literacy tests prohibited his father from voting (NJC 1). Alexander explains Cotton’s disenfranchised pedigree this way: “In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was...

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