Fourth Reading
In this next section of the book that I read, Michelle Alexander brings up predominately the shame and stigma surrounding the felon label as well as other things that happen to African-Americans when they get out of prison, particularly regarding recidivism rates. Towards the end of the section we were assigned to read, she gives an overview of all the arguments she's introduced so far, and it really helped me see clearly all the arguments she has made through her analysis of the entire process of the criminal justice system in regards to African-Americans. Through the first stop to the plea bargains and convictions, to prison time and aftermath, she provides an entire overview of the almost hopeless situation facing African-Americans.
Her overarching thesis or argument of this book is that America has a racial caste system that has adapted from the times of slavery to the Jim Crow Laws, and now to this period of mass incarceration and war on drugs that disproportionately affects African-Americans. She argues that this is just the newest form of racial discrimination and injustice. On page 184, she uses Iris Marion Young's comparison of the period of mass incarceration of African-Americans to a bird in a cage, with each wire being another law, custom, or practice that serves to keep the African-American within a cage. She argues that although these individual wires may not be seen as racist, or may not have been created with racist intentions, altogether the wires serve to trap the bird into what she calls the racial caste system, or perpetual cycle of marginalization and inferiority of African-Americans.
She says, "One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape." She says later on page 185, "Only when we view the cage from a distance can we disengage from the maze of rationalizations that are offered for each wire and see how the entire apparatus operates to keep African-Americans perpetually trapped."
This comparison to the birdcage describes her overall argument. Her argument that a racial caste system exists in our modern society is ultimately the cage that she's referring to that relegates African-Americans to a second-class place in our society. Within this overarching argument, she makes many other arguments about the wires themselves, or the individual issues that she sees that perpetuate racial disadvantages. She ends up giving readers the entire view of the cage by going through step by step in the criminal justice system and seeing how at every level, or every wire, African-Americans are at a disadvantage.
She begins her argument by setting the scene of racial injustice and discussing how ideas of race and black inferiority came to be, and the political motivations that were heavily tied to racial ideas. She discusses early America, slavery, the war waged on Native Americans and gives the background of race in America. She then moves forward to show how race was used as a political tool by people like Richard Nixon during his presidential campaign so that he could get many poor whites' votes by introducing the ideas of the War on Drugs and the association of African-Americans as criminals.
She describes how people like Nixon used the crack epidemic that hit the urban communities as a way to associate blacks with criminals and increase funding and support for law enforcement agencies to target and incarcerate millions of African-Americans, often on drug crimes and minor offenses. She argues that this "War on drugs" that was supposedly supposed to rid the country of the crack problem actually fueled it, and as a cost for his political agenda, millions of blacks were rounded up and sent to prisons. She argues that this "War on Drugs" was a deliberate attempt by many people in power to further their political agenda, especially by getting votes from poor whites in the south, at the expense of many black people.
As she argues on page 61, "the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward mass drug arrests and facilitate the conviction and imprisonment of an unprecedented number of Americans, whether guilty or innocent." She provides data and statistics to argue how there are incentives for law enforcement after this period of "get tough on crime" to arrest and imprison many communities of color, and how many police officers themselves are put under tremendous pressure to arrest or find as much crime as they can. She describes how this "War on Drugs" movement shaped our nation into one in which we have a racial caste system.
She then describes how the system in which people are targeted for crimes is particularly disadvantageous to black communities. She describes stop and frisk laws, searches and seizure laws, quotas and incentives for law enforcement agencies to find as much drug crime as possible, and how police officers are allowed to use "discretion" in order to target predominately African-American communities in which they look for crime. I see these individual laws and problems as various wires on that cage. Standing alone, one may not see the tremendous implications of them, but together they serve to ensure that people of color will be stripped of their rights and put in prisons disproportionately to whites, and this is only at the initial stage of the criminal justice system.
As she states in the book on page 99, "rates and patterns of drug crime do not explain the glaring racial disparities in our criminal justice system. People of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates," her point being that all groups of people use drugs and commit crimes at very similar rates, so the idea that African-Americans do crime more frequently is false. They don't commit crimes more often, but the statistical disproportions of crimes committed are not actually because it's more frequent among people of color, but because they're more likely to be stopped, arrested, convicted, and put in prison for crimes than whites are.
Once African-Americans have been stopped and frisked or searched to find evidence of a crime, they enter the legal process of being sentenced and convicted of crimes. As Alexander describes it, many of them are forced to accept plea bargains that are completely unfair to the crimes that they have committed, with the prosecutor exercising enormous amounts of discretion in what to charge them. If they actually choose to go to trial, they often face an entirely white jury, with countless implicit biases working against them. Even within juries, blacks are often the target of peremptory strikes in which there is no need to offer an explanation as to why they're dismissed, as long as a lawyer doesn't explicitly say it's because of their race. They also often don't have good legal representation because many African-Americans cannot afford to hire attornies because they don't have the means to do so, so they must hire public defenders, who are often short-staffed and underpaid, with countless cases that they need to go through, making them often unable to do a very good job.
With the actual sentencing of crimes, many laws are also stacked against people of color. For example, Alexander describes three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that often throw African-Americans in jail for crimes disproportionate to their sentence. She also discusses how many laws are configured so that things like a certain amount of marijuana will be considered a felony, even though it's not even on the same level as the felonies people typically think about with violent crime. The laws regarding what makes a felony are often targeted at people of color such as the "1000 to one" ratio she describes how much crack vs. cocaine is needed in order to be considered a felony, despite it being the same substance in a different form. It makes it easier for people to have committed a felony, and be permanently branded and stigmatized because of it. All of these laws regarding sentencing, she argues, only further and perpetuates the racial caste.
She also examines how even when people of color try to challenge these laws under things like the fourteenth amendment, the Supreme Court basically bars them from doing so. The Court has maintained, throughout the years, that in order for something to be violating the constitution, "one must prove intentional discrimination-conscious racial bias" (pg 130). This leaves many victims of discriminatory laws unable to do anything about the situation because the law enforcement officials are never going to overtly state that they are targeting someone because they are black. Alexander argues that the Supreme Court has upheld this systematic racism that has engulfed our country, and has actually made it virtually impossible for many people to change this system because of the way it has stated racism needs to occur in order to violate our nation's laws.
As she argues, African-Americans are discriminated against in every step of the criminal justice system. As I have already mentioned, she argues that their entry into the system is rigged, the odds of being convicted is stacked against them, and the sentences that they serve are disproportionate to the crimes they commit. If they choose to challenge these notions, she argues that Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible for them to accomplish any significant change. Her last major argument about this cage is that once they're released from prison, the chances of them being able to live a successful, happy life are slim to none.
She argues that because of things like employment discrimination of felons, housing discrimination, debts incurred and fees from time in prison/child support payments, and the lack of emotional and mental support they receive, many African-American ex-felons when they're released from prison have absolutely no opportunity to better their lives. They're pressured to get a job, but they must check the felon box on job applications, they're pressured to get housing, but they must include that they have been convicted of a crime, and they are expected to pay fees and child support payments despite the fact that they haven't worked in years and are legally allowed to be discriminated against by potential employers. Overall they're expected to get their lives back together after years spent in prison, often on a drug offense, with nowhere to live, no money to pay for things, no job, no vote, and no support, which Alexander argues, is virtually impossible.
This cycle of inequity that follows many blacks leads to an endless cycle of poverty and marginalization that is legally and socially accepted. Alexander describes all these rungs on the birdcage individually, and when placed together, one can see the full impact of the cage itself. She argues her main thesis by presenting countless smaller problems that when combined, present her argument of an overarching racial caste system similar to the times of Jim Crow laws. Together, all these barriers that African-Americans face lead to bringing them further and further into the cage of oppression in which there's often no hope of escape. Alexander effectively brings together many little elements of injustice to outline all the ways in which our criminal justice system puts African-Americans at a disadvantage, and ultimately proves her argument that America has a racial caste system that relegates blacks to second-class citizenship.
Her overarching thesis or argument of this book is that America has a racial caste system that has adapted from the times of slavery to the Jim Crow Laws, and now to this period of mass incarceration and war on drugs that disproportionately affects African-Americans. She argues that this is just the newest form of racial discrimination and injustice. On page 184, she uses Iris Marion Young's comparison of the period of mass incarceration of African-Americans to a bird in a cage, with each wire being another law, custom, or practice that serves to keep the African-American within a cage. She argues that although these individual wires may not be seen as racist, or may not have been created with racist intentions, altogether the wires serve to trap the bird into what she calls the racial caste system, or perpetual cycle of marginalization and inferiority of African-Americans.
She says, "One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape." She says later on page 185, "Only when we view the cage from a distance can we disengage from the maze of rationalizations that are offered for each wire and see how the entire apparatus operates to keep African-Americans perpetually trapped."
This comparison to the birdcage describes her overall argument. Her argument that a racial caste system exists in our modern society is ultimately the cage that she's referring to that relegates African-Americans to a second-class place in our society. Within this overarching argument, she makes many other arguments about the wires themselves, or the individual issues that she sees that perpetuate racial disadvantages. She ends up giving readers the entire view of the cage by going through step by step in the criminal justice system and seeing how at every level, or every wire, African-Americans are at a disadvantage.
She begins her argument by setting the scene of racial injustice and discussing how ideas of race and black inferiority came to be, and the political motivations that were heavily tied to racial ideas. She discusses early America, slavery, the war waged on Native Americans and gives the background of race in America. She then moves forward to show how race was used as a political tool by people like Richard Nixon during his presidential campaign so that he could get many poor whites' votes by introducing the ideas of the War on Drugs and the association of African-Americans as criminals.
She describes how people like Nixon used the crack epidemic that hit the urban communities as a way to associate blacks with criminals and increase funding and support for law enforcement agencies to target and incarcerate millions of African-Americans, often on drug crimes and minor offenses. She argues that this "War on drugs" that was supposedly supposed to rid the country of the crack problem actually fueled it, and as a cost for his political agenda, millions of blacks were rounded up and sent to prisons. She argues that this "War on Drugs" was a deliberate attempt by many people in power to further their political agenda, especially by getting votes from poor whites in the south, at the expense of many black people.
As she argues on page 61, "the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward mass drug arrests and facilitate the conviction and imprisonment of an unprecedented number of Americans, whether guilty or innocent." She provides data and statistics to argue how there are incentives for law enforcement after this period of "get tough on crime" to arrest and imprison many communities of color, and how many police officers themselves are put under tremendous pressure to arrest or find as much crime as they can. She describes how this "War on Drugs" movement shaped our nation into one in which we have a racial caste system.
She then describes how the system in which people are targeted for crimes is particularly disadvantageous to black communities. She describes stop and frisk laws, searches and seizure laws, quotas and incentives for law enforcement agencies to find as much drug crime as possible, and how police officers are allowed to use "discretion" in order to target predominately African-American communities in which they look for crime. I see these individual laws and problems as various wires on that cage. Standing alone, one may not see the tremendous implications of them, but together they serve to ensure that people of color will be stripped of their rights and put in prisons disproportionately to whites, and this is only at the initial stage of the criminal justice system.
As she states in the book on page 99, "rates and patterns of drug crime do not explain the glaring racial disparities in our criminal justice system. People of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates," her point being that all groups of people use drugs and commit crimes at very similar rates, so the idea that African-Americans do crime more frequently is false. They don't commit crimes more often, but the statistical disproportions of crimes committed are not actually because it's more frequent among people of color, but because they're more likely to be stopped, arrested, convicted, and put in prison for crimes than whites are.
Once African-Americans have been stopped and frisked or searched to find evidence of a crime, they enter the legal process of being sentenced and convicted of crimes. As Alexander describes it, many of them are forced to accept plea bargains that are completely unfair to the crimes that they have committed, with the prosecutor exercising enormous amounts of discretion in what to charge them. If they actually choose to go to trial, they often face an entirely white jury, with countless implicit biases working against them. Even within juries, blacks are often the target of peremptory strikes in which there is no need to offer an explanation as to why they're dismissed, as long as a lawyer doesn't explicitly say it's because of their race. They also often don't have good legal representation because many African-Americans cannot afford to hire attornies because they don't have the means to do so, so they must hire public defenders, who are often short-staffed and underpaid, with countless cases that they need to go through, making them often unable to do a very good job.
With the actual sentencing of crimes, many laws are also stacked against people of color. For example, Alexander describes three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that often throw African-Americans in jail for crimes disproportionate to their sentence. She also discusses how many laws are configured so that things like a certain amount of marijuana will be considered a felony, even though it's not even on the same level as the felonies people typically think about with violent crime. The laws regarding what makes a felony are often targeted at people of color such as the "1000 to one" ratio she describes how much crack vs. cocaine is needed in order to be considered a felony, despite it being the same substance in a different form. It makes it easier for people to have committed a felony, and be permanently branded and stigmatized because of it. All of these laws regarding sentencing, she argues, only further and perpetuates the racial caste.
She also examines how even when people of color try to challenge these laws under things like the fourteenth amendment, the Supreme Court basically bars them from doing so. The Court has maintained, throughout the years, that in order for something to be violating the constitution, "one must prove intentional discrimination-conscious racial bias" (pg 130). This leaves many victims of discriminatory laws unable to do anything about the situation because the law enforcement officials are never going to overtly state that they are targeting someone because they are black. Alexander argues that the Supreme Court has upheld this systematic racism that has engulfed our country, and has actually made it virtually impossible for many people to change this system because of the way it has stated racism needs to occur in order to violate our nation's laws.
As she argues, African-Americans are discriminated against in every step of the criminal justice system. As I have already mentioned, she argues that their entry into the system is rigged, the odds of being convicted is stacked against them, and the sentences that they serve are disproportionate to the crimes they commit. If they choose to challenge these notions, she argues that Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible for them to accomplish any significant change. Her last major argument about this cage is that once they're released from prison, the chances of them being able to live a successful, happy life are slim to none.
She argues that because of things like employment discrimination of felons, housing discrimination, debts incurred and fees from time in prison/child support payments, and the lack of emotional and mental support they receive, many African-American ex-felons when they're released from prison have absolutely no opportunity to better their lives. They're pressured to get a job, but they must check the felon box on job applications, they're pressured to get housing, but they must include that they have been convicted of a crime, and they are expected to pay fees and child support payments despite the fact that they haven't worked in years and are legally allowed to be discriminated against by potential employers. Overall they're expected to get their lives back together after years spent in prison, often on a drug offense, with nowhere to live, no money to pay for things, no job, no vote, and no support, which Alexander argues, is virtually impossible.
This cycle of inequity that follows many blacks leads to an endless cycle of poverty and marginalization that is legally and socially accepted. Alexander describes all these rungs on the birdcage individually, and when placed together, one can see the full impact of the cage itself. She argues her main thesis by presenting countless smaller problems that when combined, present her argument of an overarching racial caste system similar to the times of Jim Crow laws. Together, all these barriers that African-Americans face lead to bringing them further and further into the cage of oppression in which there's often no hope of escape. Alexander effectively brings together many little elements of injustice to outline all the ways in which our criminal justice system puts African-Americans at a disadvantage, and ultimately proves her argument that America has a racial caste system that relegates blacks to second-class citizenship.
A thorough discussion of the structure and development of Alexander's argument, as well as good examples to support your ideas. If you see it as a compelling argument, how can Alexander spread this information to others? Certainly many who disagree or don't see this as a problem are unlikely to read the book. So how could this information get out to others?
ReplyDeleteThis is a really great summary of a lot of the ideas mentioned by Alexander throughout the book and how they all fit together. You did a great job citing specific quotes from the passage, which would be particularly helpful for those who have not read the book yet. Overall, did you find Alexander’s arguments effective? I felt that at times they were lacking evidence, but by and large she thoroughly researched this topic and provided very specific evidence to back up her claims in most every step of the way. Also, what did you think of the relationship between the appeals to logos and pathos? Did you feel as though she focused too heavily on or neglected either one? Really great job!
ReplyDelete