Michelle Alexander invokes a revolution at Black History Month address
Michelle Alexander has spent her life trying to take the blinders off the eyes of young people who view race relations in a vacuum. Yet she too admits she was once blind to the main problems facing young black men in America — an inherently discriminatory racial caste system.
As the keynote speaker for Central Michigan University’s Black History Month celebration, Alexander spoke about aggressive incarceration tactics of black men, Tuesday in Plachta Auditorium while sharing valuable statistics on the disparity between the incarceration of blacks to whites in America.
“We haven’t ended the racial caste system in America,” Alexander said. “We have simply redesigned it.”
In what she calls “The New Jim Crow,” which is also the title of her new book, Alexander said the gains we’ve made since the Civil Rights era have been reversed and repackaged — sold to us in the form of a costly War on Drugs and a prejudiced justice system.
Alexander said the justice system has helped legalize the same injustices perpetuated by Jim Crow laws in the early 1900s. Those individuals who do eventually leave prison, Alexander said, find themselves back in jail almost immediately — mostly because of harassment and biased police.
Describing the plight of young black men in a society still reeling from events like the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, she urged listeners to wake up from their apathy and to accept what she could not all those years ago.
“We have become the most punitive nation in the world and its roots have much to do with race,” she said. “The most punitive nations are often the most diverse. It seems that an aspect of human nature is a punitive impulse to those we label as others.”
Alexander is an author, a renowned public speaker and a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. Before becoming an advocate against the prison industrial complex and its handling of black men, Alexander worked as a lawyer with the ACLU in Oakland, Calif.
Working in Oakland helped forge her way of thinking now while working to file discrimination lawsuits against Californian police departments. Alexander was moved by those she worked with to take a stronger stance against the industrial prison complex.
While she admits that changing the system is a large task, Alexander told those in attendance that she has faith the current generation can take up the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. as a revolutionary, not just a peacemaker.
“I have hope today that we will end mass incarceration and end the cycle of creating a caste systems in this country,” she said. “Bill O’Reilly said protestors should ashamed of themselves, but I feel nothing but pride when I think about those protestors, and Martin Luther King Jr. and others would feel pride as well.”
