Greg Thomas WHY SOME LIKE THE NEW JIM CROW SO MUCH: Michelle Alexander is unlike Some Radical

Group[s] who must be Crazy & Absurd This book is not for everyone. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010) Riveted on skeptics, Michelle Alexander writes of three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States today in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). She will never label them white, or white-supremacist, or colonialist. Yet this United States remains a setter colony and, now, a super empire, still. Nor will she call the latest system (of control) racist, or even a system of racial hostility. She labels these three systems mass incarceration, Jim Crow and slavery (Alexander 2012, 14). These labels are quite critically loose. By slavery she could only mean antebellum chattel slavery. For many slaveries thrive up into the 21st century, including penal slavery itself, globally as well locally. It is not clear why the colloquial term Jim Crow is the second term of choice. E. Franklin Frazier would remind us that the architects of segregation conceived of Black populations as unfit for human association not merely inferior, subordinate, or criminal. Does Alexander comprehend this system; this North American apartheid, well beyond Whites Only and Colored Only signs, symbolically? Does mass incarceration describe the entire condition of Black oppression under the current era of white racist rule or, no doubt, one centrally important element of it? How much or how little can be revealed about white racist oppression and the Black condition of oppression via polite, generic euphemisms like racialized systems of control, moreover?

Later, The New Jim Crow will read in the title chapter of the text: It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration) (219). An evolutionary model of analysis should raise all kinds of questions. How distinct, if at all, are Black historical experiences of exploitation, subordination and marginalization, which is to say, is there supposed to be no subordination or marginalization under antebellum chattel slavery; little exploitation or marginalization under Jim Crow or de jure segregation; and no defining features of exploitation or subordination in the context of mass incarceration, in actual truth? Why set up a basic conceptual framework that is so basically flawed? Lastly, for starters, why should The New Jim Crow continuation of Jim Crow of old not also be a New Slavery, or NeoSlavery, since Jim Crow of old did reformulate antebellum chattel slavery itself in such scandalous ways? Where is the slavery of penal slavery in The New Jim Crow? Is the Jim Crow privileged here more comforting than the many slaveries of our past and present to whom, and for what evolutionary approach to history in the African Americas? Has this book been questioned at all? AUDIENCE vs. EVERYONE

Apart from a curious subtitle, Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow contains a very curious Preface and a potentially shocking set of Acknowledgements where she identifies her husband as a federal prosecutor. This is before its general argument ever gets under way. But does anybody really read this text, or any text, these days in particular? This is a minted book, a hot commodity. There are three pages of blurbs or endorsements from some of the most establishment newspapers and media figures in North America, prior to the title page of the revised edition which now boldly in 2012 boasts A New Foreword by a commercial academician, Cornel West. For so many, it has quickly become a standard reference in contemporary commentary on prisons (or mass incarceration). This New York Times Best Sellers-style commodification certainly demands critical discussion itself, especially since uncritical consumers of The New Jim Crow include a number of political audiences which the author could not possibly have in mind. After all, if we skip the brand-name Foreword, her Preface begins, curiously: This book is not for everyone.

The author writes that she has a specific audience in mind and proceeds to list several contrasting audiences in suspiciously vague terms. First, there are people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. You may be left to wonder who can fail to appreciate the facts of mass incarceration and, relatedly, how they could still demonstrate their deep and apparently unquestionable concern for racial justice at the same time. At any rate, Alexander says she is writing in this case for people like me, herself, or the person she was ten years ago. Secondly, there are those who have been struggling to persuade others, or those who have lacked the facts and data to back up their claims. Allegedly, these people know the deal regarding mass incarceration, unlike Alexander of ten years ago; they instead, somehow, lack information, unlike Alexander of today, allegedly. Third, and finally, there are those who are prisoners themselves: I am writing this book for all those trapped within Americas latest caste system. You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society, but you are not forgotten (xiii). Is the problem of mass incarceration one of forgetting? This is how Alexanders one-paragraph preface ends. The wording suggests that she is not writing for this audience to read and critically analyze her writing not at all; this would be a writing on their behalf, so to speak, whoever these theoretical prisoners are in her view, en masse, whose goal in her view would be to get out of prison and into mainstream society. You may be left to wonder where are the prisoners who have other political-ideological desires and far from mainstream intellectual traditions of their own, not only in this Preface, but in The New Jim Crow as a whole.

If this book is not for everyone, then who is everyone exactly? Who is the excepted nonaudience of The New Jim Crow, by its own, awfully indirect admission? How does this affect its form as well as content? Alexander uses no racial signifiers to describe her intended audience for a book on racial caste. From the outset, this is one of many racial taboos she will not think of violating as a writer and lawyer grounded in mere liberal reformism, simple civil rights liberalism. The actually implied audience of the text is a provincial white and middleclass audience for whom any anti-racist talk that is too Black or too radical is an abomination. Others may buy the book and advertise it for her and The New Press. But any hint of such

Blackness or such radicalism is actively and aggressively barred from The New Jim Crow, like barbarians at the gate of an ironically Negrophobic analysis.

Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions, wrote George L. Jackson in Blood in My Eye (1972) or On Withdrawal (Jackson 1990, 125). (I can quote this text; this figure; this context. My audience is Black and anyone who can read without the need to eliminate or whitewash Blackness from their universe of reading, writing and meaning.)

A former prisoner himself, Huey P. Newton wrote in Prisons (1969) of two types of prisoners, famously, the illegitimate capitalist and the political prisoner. The first type was dubbed so because they had tried to acquire everything or something that capitalism defines as legitimate, while the capitalist elite defines their attempt to participate in the world of exploitation as illegitimate or crime. The second type argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top. Thus, this second type of prisoner says that the society is corrupt and illegitimate and must be overthrown. They do not accept the legitimacy of the society and cannot participate in its corrupting exploitation or in what Alexander instinctively embraces as the mainstream, whether they are in the prison or on the block (Newton 1995, 219).

The BPP co-founders legendary hero, George Jackson often spoke of the inside prison and the outside prison. The worlds most famous political prisoner ever, perhaps, he spoke of all imprisonment and all prisoners as either political prisoners or prisoners of a specific political order, a specific political economy. The 20th centurys most powerful theorist of neo-slavery, not merely Jim Crow segregation, he wrote in Soledad Brother (1970), no less famously: After one concedes that racism is stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life in general (the definition of fascism is: a police state wherein the political ascendancy is tied into and protects the interests of the upper class characterized by militarism, racism, and imperialism), and concedes further that criminals and crime arise from material, economic, sociopolitical causes, we can then burn all of the criminology and penology libraries and direct our attention where it will do some good (Jackson 1994, 18).

The Freedom Archives describes him the leading theoretician of the modern prison [or antiprison] movement in Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation (2002). Yet there will be no memory or mention of him or Huey Newton or the Black Panthers or any prisoner movement or the Black Power or Black liberation movement or any of the globalizing social movements of the 1960s and 70s at all in Alexanders The New Jim Crow. She will indeed forget them (i.e., their activism, their critical ideas and ideals), for the benefit of her rhetorically masked audience (which is assuredly a reflection of herself). Who can afford to overlook this ideological sleight of hand, this censorship in the name of the Black masses?

In her Introduction to The New Jim Crow, the keywords are imperial buzzwords like Founding Fathers, democracy, and reform, not to mention Obama. The only political organizations of note are the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Urban League. No others can be mentioned or taken seriously, for serious mention might lead some from thinking reform to thinking resistance or what Harold Cruse famously referred to as rebellion or revolution.

Pivotally, Alexander traces the origins of her book and its title to a flyer she saw on the street years ago: THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW, it read. Her response was, she says, dismissive: Some radical group was holding a community meeting. She sighed and muttered to herself: Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesnt help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think youre crazy. She headed to her new job as director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU, which is by no means some radical group (Alexander 2012, 3). Its members are people, the quasi-generic people of Alexanders target audience; and they are not absurd or crazy. The radicals implied by this story are invoked anxiously, sparsely and pejoratively in the remainder of this Introduction as activists and conspiracy theorists. Unlike people, or her racial justice advocates of liberal reformism (19), they will never have individual or organizational names, let alone books, articles or position papers, to be cited or engaged in any manner, even though they have provided Alexander with the very idea and title for her first and highly commercialized book (along with all of its perks on lecture circuits, cable television shows, etc.). Quiet as its kept, the thought of radicals, old or new the thought of being affiliated or associated with unreasonable radicals and their crazy, absurd thoughts, this haunts Alexanders The New Jim Crow from beginning to end. HISTORY The first chapter, The Rebirth of Caste is a rewriting of history U.S. history, the only history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the world. It moves first from The Birth of Slavery to The Death of Slavery, despite the fact that slavery does not die. Indeed, Alexander first lauds the achievement of the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, for abolishing slavery (29), and only belatedly concedes that it reframed or rearticulated slavery instead of abolishing it. For slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime (31). In the following section, The Birth of Jim Crow, she cites work by two white historians, David Oshinskys Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996) and Douglas Blackmons Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (2008), as if their formulations do not contradict her critical framework and easy historical periodization. They come behind George Jacksons work on neo-slavery in Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye in any case. The next section in Alexanders chapter is entitled The Death of Jim Crow, although this titling contradicts the core argument of The New Jim Crow. The final section, The Birth of Mass Incarceration begins with the late 1950s and concentrates on the Civil Rights Movement before suddenly and very strangely leaping into the 1980s of

Ronald Reagan and the U.S governments so-called War on Drugs. Nothing noteworthy is supposed to happen in the interim, such as the Black Power Movement (which marked the radical limitations of this Civil Rights Movement, of course) and all of the other radical movements of the late 1960s and 70s. Magically disappeared are the Black Panther Party (BPP), George Jackson and the prison-based movement he led which burst into the Attica Rebellion as well as various and sundry international and trans-racial solidarities of world historical significance. This is not simply a forgetting, to be certain. From this first chapter on forwards, their literature on prison and from prison (systems of racial and social control, in Alexanders parlance) is written out of The New Jim Crows rewriting of history as well U.S. history, the only official history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the Western and non-Western world.

The stage is set for this popular study to be completed within the trap of settler nationalist thought, early 1950s style; the settler nationalist thinking of elite cries for liberal legal reform; the settler nationalism that is white nationalism by another name, or the throwback integrationists white majoritarian, white-supremacist nationalism of U.S. colonialism and imperialism all slavery, Jim Crow apartheid and neo-slavery aside.

For this Americanism, as Malcolm X classically and crucially framed it, Alexander cites everything but traditions of Black political and even academic radicalism in The New Jim Crow. Bibliographically, she may be most fond of making reference to Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project and wily French sociologist Loc Wacquant. Michael Omi and Howard Winant are safe, in passing, despite their indebtedness to more radical social movements, which they deflect for North American sociology themselves. Alexander can quote Iris Marion Young academically and, for a second, Marilyn Frye insofar as she is not introduced as a white radical lesbian feminist. As hallmarks of electoral or U.S. Constitutional liberalism, Derrick Bell as well as Gerald Torres and Lani Guinier find a place in The New Jim Crow, too. So do, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and some early-iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, all quite predictably. And then there is Glenn Loury, the ex-conservative economist and former Reagan-appointee who was born again as a progressive (liberal) after public and legal charges of battery and drug addiction led to his resignation from Harvard University and the arch-conservative spotlight. He is far from off limits in The New Jim Crow, but all Black radicalism is completely out of bounds. Totally silenced and more invisible for her text than even Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (1952), its farther out than Mars.

There is no Malcolm X in Alexanders history here, either, even though he exists before Alexander employs her narrative time machine to leap from the mid-1960s to Reagans 1980s over the later, radical 1960s and early 1970s. How could she speak of the man who told his audience, famously: Dont be shocked when I say that I was in prison. Youre still in prison. Thats what America means: prison, in the face of her audience? What kind of history of Civil Rights can be written without him, his own emergence from prison and his spectacular critical commentary on Civil Rights without Human Rights or Pan-Africanism?

Just a few moments of his classic oratory would undermine the entire voice of The New Jim Crow. His Message to the Grassroots (1963) speaks to the grassroots, fearlessly, not about them. What Alexander praises as the March on Washington, Malcolm famously demystifies as the Farce on Washington in his critical expose of the white power structure and its Negro elite civil rights establishment the big guns of Negro leaders used against the Black revolution. There is, further, The Ballot or the Bullet (1964) on what Alexander repeatedly bemoans as second-class citizenship: What do you call second-class citizenship? Why thats colonization. Second-class citizenship is nothing but 20th century slavery. How are you going to tell me youre a second-class citizen? They dont have second-class citizenship in any other government on this earth. They just have slaves and people who are free. This is why he could decode both segregation (or Jim Crow) and integration as both systems white racist power and control. And whereas Alexander recites the words our nation countless times throughout The New Jim Crow, ad nauseam, melodramatizing total emotional allegiance to the U.S. government despite this gargantuan racial caste system, Malcolm in Message to the Grassroots would respond in advance: Im a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this mans house on fire, you dont hear these little Negroes talking about, our government is in trouble. They say, The government is in trouble. Imagine a Negro: Our government! I even heard one say our astronauts. They wont even let him near the plant and our astronauts! Our Navy thats a Negro thats out of his mind. Thats a Negro thats out of his mind!

To be Black and out of ones mind here is a political as well as psycho-pathological matter and a profound geo-psychiatric evaluation reminiscent of the popular and academic-intellectual work of one Frantz Fanon from Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Toward the African Revolution (1964).

Many unwitting consumers of The New Jim Crow who could only find themselves erased and rendered crazy or absurd and unreasonable by its rhetoric would also be supporters of Sundiata Acoli, the comrade of Assata Shakur; a present-day political prisoner in his seventies; and the author of an influential article online, A Brief History of the New African Prison Struggle (1992). He writes: This article was first written at the request of the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO). Its original title was The Rise and Development of the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle Behind the Walls. The first section of this extensive two-part history, The 16th Century to the Civil War begins by looking back further beyond U.S. settlercolonial nationalist historiography: The Afrikan prison struggle began on the shores of Afrika behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery. It continues today behind the walls of modern U.S. penitentiaries where all prisoners are held as legal slaves a blatant violation of international law.

This makes all such prisoners, again, political prisoners of some sort. However, there is no such thing as political prisoners on any definition, broad or narrow in

Alexanders writing, not in her Preface, Acknowledgements, Introduction or six chapters of The New Jim Crow.

There is no international law in Alexanders legal realm or legal analysis. There is not even a Mumia Abu-Jamal, the worlds most famous political prisoner at this point in time, arguably, and the author of a small library of widely translated books on the politics of prison himself. And forget about Assata Shakur politically exiled in Cuba with a $1 million bounty on her head, a reward which could be raised to $5 million if the new Attorney General of the State of New Jersey, Jeffery S. Chiesa, has his way with the FBI. If this nation (which is not a nation) were ours, then no refugee of COINTELPRO (the FBIs infamous Counter INTELligence PROgram) could be ours too. The former Joanne Chesimard renames herself a 20th century escaped slave and a Maroon woman, but there is little to no slavery and no criminal FBI war on Black revolutionaries in The New Jim Crow. How is this vicious and violent state repression of political activists somehow not a part of The New Jim Crow, or America, for Alexander?

The contrast between Sundiata Acolis writing of history and Alexanders filtering of history is instructive. He proceeds in sections entitled Post-Civil War to the 20th Century, The 20th Century through World War II, Post-World War II to the Civil Rights Era, The Emergence of Afrikan Nations, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and Civil Rights through the Black Power Era, for example. She truncates history so as to efface or erase Black Power in favor of Civil Rights, censoring Black Power in effect. He, like others, inserts Pan-African Black internationalism into North American historiography and specifies this Black Power Era and a Black Liberation Era. He details Civil Rights Struggles in Prison and Religious Struggles in Prison, Origins of the New World Nation of Islam and Origins of the Five Percenters as well as how Black Panthers Usher in the Black Liberation Movement. Not excluded are The New Afrikan Independence Movement, COINTELPRO Attacks, The Rise of Prison Struggles and The Black Liberation Army. His article ultimately closes with a decade-by-decade analysis: The End of the 70s, The Decade of the 80s, and The 90s and Beyond. In short, he does not reduce history after the Civil Rights Movement to Ronald Reagan and the U.S. governments so-called War on Drugs. WAR & DRUGS The true subject of The New Jim Crow and each of its chapters is practically this and this alone. The rhetoric of a War on Drugs does not share space in Alexander with other language that is basic to other, prior political analyses of Black imprisonment or mass incarceration. There is no critical language of capitalism or class or exploitation in The New Jim Crow. A few hesitant references to financial incentive or the profit motive in drug law enforcement may be found, infrequently, in their place. Not even the often very chic language of a Prison Industrial Complex has any presence at all. Forget James Boggss far more preferable language of a military-economic-police bloc in his American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook (1963). The language of race and to a lesser extent racism is present, but

the conceptualization of race and racism is in any event weak, narrow, anemic i.e., liberal. The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is, after all, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The state rhetoric of a War on Drugs is thus centrally entertained by Alexander without entertaining it as a rhetorical disguise of capitalism, exploitation, militarism, mass/state murder, imperialism or a cultural and political economy of white, anti-Black racism.

It may be true that there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. However, no other reasons or pretexts for imprisonment warrant any substantial attention in The New Jim Crow. Alexander concludes: Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs (Alexander 2012, 60). She would take Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty rhetoric seriously and lauds his Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964 (39); and, although she must note more than once that this alleged War on Drugs does not target kingpins, let alone what we could call narco-trafficking, she still takes this federal rhetoric seriously on its own status-quo terms. Her contemporary interpretation of incarceration and criminalization is then disconnected from the long history of Black criminalization by AngloNorth America which predates the U.S. state formation and includes the white criminalization of enslaved African communities on plantations under official chattel slavery as well as nominally free Black communities both in the North and the South in addition to the white criminalization of Black/African-Diasporic communities under de jure or Jim Crow segregation or U.S. national apartheid. If, en masse, Black people have more critically catalogued everything from Driving While Black to Breathing While Black as social crimes in this country, historically, the essential, white-defined crime of Being Black cannot be reduced to a recent, color-blind side-effect of the selective prosecution of drug offenses at the lowest socio-economic level.

Richard Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) writes in The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks (2012): For brazen criminality, no one tops the bankers. But a banker in jail is as rare as a honest senator. He reports on the criminal history of Wachovia Bank before its takeover by Wells Fargo with the assistance of billions of dollars in federal funding. That bank was found guilty of having laundered at least $378 billion in drug money from 2004-07 for Mexican drug cartels. To buy planes for the transport of cocaine, these cartels also funneled through Bank of America, which is described as notorious for the practice of face-lifting money-laundering with a posture of legitimacy. So, the Wachovia executives, who admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right? Becker cuts to the chase: Not one Wachovia executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer. His point is that while the government rules over the people under capitalism, the banks rule over the government and the entire system. This will only change when the people take power and put an end to a system of, by and for the super rich. Nothing like this is accomplished by the liberalism of The New Jim Crow, which never thinks to challenge the establishment definition of crime or criminality.

CRIME Over and again, Alexander can statistically dispute the notion that Black people commit more crimes than white people, yet only in the context of her own unexamined notion of crime, guilt and innocence. She cannot question government or governmental law. She categorically states (in The Lockdown): Court cases involving drug-law enforcement almost always involve guilty people. Police usually release the innocent on the street often without a ticket, citation, or even an apology (Alexander 2012, 69). So how does she or they determine or manufacture guilt versus innocence here, except outside the law itself which is no doubt an instrument of the powerful and one not normally deployed against kingpins or corporations or government? The trial is a formality; her legal system, suddenly, supposedly, infallible. This statement concerning guilt is quickly contradicted chapter after chapter by ample evidence of police corruption, racism and profiteering, apart from the legal politics of snitching and pleabargaining. At any rate, Alexanders conventional conception of crime, guilt and innocence as well as law and government remain essentially undisturbed despite the radical injustice of the racial caste system that would be The New Jim Crow.

There is no state or governmental crime here in The New Jim Crow because the book uses and consolidates the states definition or conceptualization of crime without question.

This is why she writes of the CIA: It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence been revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruction of the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into the United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide (6). In her evaluation of evidence for a target audience that is presumed or expected to know nothing of these matters, there is no discussion of Ollie Norths Iran-Contra scandal. There is no mention of Pulitzer-Prize winner Gary Webb or his San Jose Mercury News investigative journalism, or his alleged death by suicide after these exposs effectively ended his career in the corporateestablishment media complex. There is no memory or recall of any other intentional state assaults on Black bodies, such as the forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (not to mention its more recently exposed analogue in Guatemala) and many others showcased in Harriet A. Washingtons Medical Apartheid (2006) before, during and after Jim Crow segregation. Nor is there any memory of the whole history of Black movements charging Alexanders nation with genocide before the United Nations. So must William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. and even the eminently quotable W.E.B. Du Bois be forgiven, too, as signatories to We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (1951)? And, again, there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the FBI in The New Jim Crow or its intentional COINTELPRO destruction of Black community activists, dissidents, leaders, organizations, etc. RACISM vs. COLOR-BLINDNESS What feeble criticism of racism is possible in this framework? The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is not only strange, it ushers a colossal contradiction, many of which abound page after

page, section after section, repetitive chapter after chapter: Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness could theoretically make sense in a discussion of racial caste or control, if by colorblindness it was meant colorblindness as rhetoric or rationale rather than colorblindness as an actual, factual reality in North America. But Alexander accepts and affirms her audiences claim to not see race or color; to not be racist; to no longer champion a system that can or should be categorized as unambiguously racist in the world-famous tradition of white American racism. Having made this truly strange concession, she must find some way to account for the contemporary existence of racial caste, racial control or The New Jim Crow. The argument could not possibly succeed for those in Alexanders target audience who champion colorblindness as a reality would never speak the language of racial caste and those outside her target audience (i.e., everybody else) who know the reality of this racial condition could not possibly believe the United States of America to be a colorblind society or nation.

In The Color of Justice, her third chapter, Alexander writes as if she wonders: What, then, does explain the extraordinary racial disparities in our criminal justice system? Old-fashioned racism seems out of the question (Alexander 2012, 103). She assumes a downright silly dichotomy between racism of old and something new that is racial but not necessarily racist, and this old-fashioned racism is supposed to be simple or always straightforward and not misconstrued and underestimated by a simple-minded approach to it.

She construes racism as by definition old on a rather old-fashioned sociological model which construes racism as merely overt, explicit prejudice a racism that is not guarded or denied, ever. She terms this the work of a bigot (103). But bigotry is not racisms contemporary vocabulary; and her racism of old was itself often and variously covert or codified and implicit with regard to social-institutional structures as well as individual prejudices and attitudes. Patriotically, Alexander continues: Politicians and law enforcement officials today rarely endorse racially biased practices and most of them fiercely condemn racial discrimination of any kind. Seriously? They may not endorse or expose what they think to be or recognize as their white racism in public, on camera. Do they fiercely condemn racism of any kind say, against young Black males in hoodies or Arabs of any kind, anywhere, during their War on Terror subterfuges? (Is U.S. imperialism colorblind, too, now, abroad?) The very thought is an insult to intelligence. Still, Alexander describes forms of race discrimination that were open and notorious for centuries as the only form of racism; as something un-American now; and as an affront to our newly conceived ethic of colorblindness. To hear her tell it, there is a national anti-discrimination principle and there has been a profound shift in racial attitudes (100). There is no old or new-fashioned racism in Alexanders writing, either, even though there is this mass incarceration of Black people or The New Jim Crow.

Her conclusion will be that racial indifference and blindness far more than racial hostility form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems (242). You might wonder what other caste systems are studied here, comparatively: none. Or, what impossible explanation is offered

to clarify how any country blind to race or color could construct a racial caste system in the first place, without creating and seeing race and color in order to institute it and police it with guns as opposed to indifference. You might ask what happens in all racial caste systems when the lower caste refuses to stay in its designated place (physically, economically, symbolically; individually or collectively) and threatens to upset the hierarchical system of race and caste? Nothing? No. The racist upper caste responds as usual with more or other modes of hostility and unmitigated violence which is no doubt the very definition of racism and caste virtually everywhere except in Alexanders The New Jim Crow.

Besides defining U.S. racism in terms of a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions, psychosocially, George Jackson outlined three different categories of white racism or white racists: the overt, self-satisfied racist, the self-interdicting racist and the unconscious racist. The first in this formulation doesnt attempt to hide his or her antipathy, their hostility. The second harbors or nurtures racism in spite [their] best efforts. The third has often little or no awareness of [their] racist preconceptions (Jackson 1990, 111). And this analytical grid offered in Blood in My Eye was focused on a consideration of white Leftists in Towards a United Front. What of Alexanders preferred audience of anti-Communist Americans and their morbid fears of Blacks and revolutions?

Her book turns away from a long tradition and a wide range of anti-racist critical frameworks, ones which zero in on institutionalized racism and the political economy of racism as well as Blood in My Eyes overt, self-interdicting and unconscious racisms, in the plural. These are precisely the traditions and critical frameworks silently and systematically renounced by Alexanders The New Jim Crow, which like the U.S. corporate media will only see racism when it is overt, conscious, obvious and, at bottom, publically avowed or confessed. Her American racism must always be uniform, static and undisguised in other words, utterly ridiculous in retrospect.

One decade and a half before Alexander, David Oshinsky could recall in Worse than Slavery: Racial caste and custom also pervaded the legal system. There were four kinds of law in Mississippi, whites like to say: statute law, plantation law, lynch law, and Negro law. According to S.F. Davis, a prominent Delta attorney and self-described scholar: The judges, lawyers, and jurors all know that some of our laws are to be enforced only against the white people, and others only against the Negroes, and they are enforced accordingly (Oshinsky 1996, 124). Be that as it may, Alexander never ceases to uphold the law in The New Jim Crow as an abstraction, a formally colorblind criminal justice system (Alexander 2012, 103), within which she must find some way to weakly protest the mass incarceration of Black people, nationwide and on an unprecedented scale.

She has to resolve her needless conundrums with crude contradiction. The title chapter of The New Jim Crow counts as many differences between this new system and that old system as similarities, while at the same time cataloguing as differences what could very easily amount to

similarities themselves (191-217). Moreover, having dismissed racism and racial hostility as historical relics, Alexander explains the racially discriminatory results of the present system as emerging from a two-stage process: The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. This is cop racism, old-fashioned police racism and racial fascism under white racist caste. However, Alexander shirks from calling racism what it is both before and after this or that statement which labels racism un-American and white America as colorblind or currently incapable of racism or racial hostility. Then, the damning step, she adds: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in a racially discriminatory fashion (103). Subtly, dishonestly, racially discriminatory comes to replace racism in her rhetoric as if they were not synonymous; and, soon enough, she must concede: The dirty little secret of policing is that the Supreme Court has actually granted the police license to discriminate (130). The Court licenses the police to practice racial discrimination (or persecution and prosecution and imprisonment). The judges of this Supreme Court in their own racism license this police racism although racism no longer exists and is old-fashioned according to Alexander. This dirty little secret is not overt its targets know it inside out, but its practitioners do not admit it openly, so it wont be recognized as racism or Alexander will offend her target audience. Central contradictions abounding, she must substitute impotent, pathetic euphemisms instead.

Critically, we are returned to George Jacksons discourse of masking or disguise: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eyes anti-capitalist examination of racism, neo-slavery and fascism updated to disguise exceeding narrow periodization or world historical timelines. He wrote to rip off the masks. With great timidity, Alexander will briefly refer to her audiences tendency of denial (223). Later, she recalls a study which found that whites are so loath to talk about race and so fearful of violating racial etiquette that they indicate a preference for avoiding all contact with black people (238). Translation, for a different audience (that is, for everyone else): so fearful of having their whiteness and their anti-Black racism exposed, unmasked, and the world as they wish to know it put to an end. Wearing the proverbial masks of Paul Laurence Dunbar in the worst way, Alexander denies the existence and ferocity of white racism as such as much as these whites do. Fearful of violating racist political etiquette herself, she covers for them as they yearn for a colorblind world which means a world of white power without Black people or Black power. Repressing slavery, neo-slavery and anyone who theorizes it, she never dares to think fascism with racial caste or her racial caste itself without restraint. On the contrary, she helps disguise racism in a fashion that consolidates it under the cover of colorblindness a way of not seeing which she eventually sees as political liability while still casting it as an actual contemporary reality in North America as opposed to a rhetoric or rationale of white racism itself. CONCLUSON: COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY LOVE The ultimate expression of law is not order its prison. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor,

desperate people like me. George L. Jackson, American Justice / Blood in My Eye (1972)

It should be no surprise that the political action proposed in The New Jim Crow is pitched as a plea for love, Christian love, and of course forgiveness. In closing, crazy and absurd activists in the distance, this law professor comes to speak the language of movement, but only to ask for a new civil rights movement (223), in spite of the gross limitations of such liberal reformism and her unrelenting avoidance of every other kind of movement in recent history, nationally and internationally. This is the classic sado-masochistic attachment to white racist Americanism of the Negro or African-American elite, the Black lumpen-bourgeoisie. The absence of any critical class analysis in Alexander is a reflection of this uncritical paradigm of civil-rights reformism, a class-specific liberalism of U.S. settler nationalism in a scorchand-burn age of U.S. imperialism worldwide.

Her last chapter is entitled The Fire This Time. The only James Baldwin in The New Jim Crow is the one attached to the old civil rights movement. It is never the one who said the term civil rights movement is an American phrase which upon examination means nothing at all; or the one who wrote No Name in the Street (1972) and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); or the one who said in the midst of the Black Power Movement that he had formerly been the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father. As an exile or expatriate, he represented hard and long for George Lester Jackson and the Black Panther Party at large. Nonetheless, politically selective and clich, Alexanders reach for The Fire Next Time (1963) cannot envision revolutionary love as a counter-revolutionary love discourse begins and climaxes The New Jim Crow in lieu of any radical political action, or activism, of course.

When Alexander writes Gangsta Love, a small section of an earlier chapter, The Cruel Hand, she makes her second, wildly generalizing reference to rap and black youth. The first would quote their reference to police occupation of ghetto communities without recognizing this as a graphic reference to white colonialism or imperialism (123-26). The second apologizes for gangsta rap to her white and middle-class audience of peers, or skeptics. Hip-Hop is not in her vocabulary; and she shows no knowledge whatsoever of even Hip-Hop Studies. In true middle-class fashion, she claims that gangsta rap is a case of black youth embracing criminality and embracing their stigma (171). It could not be that there are any values other than white and middle-class values or that black youth are embracing instead their cultural rejection of white and middle class values as well as white and middle class conceptions of crime or criminality quite in the tradition of many revolutionary movements uniformly repressed by The New Jim Crow.

This patronizing, pop-psyche treatment of love should call to mind Alexanders Acknowledgements, which your average consumer-reader might very well ignore. There she testifies: My husband, Carter Stewart, has been my rock. As a federal prosecutor, he does not share my views about the criminal justice system, but his different worldview has not, even

for a moment, compromised his ability to support me, lovingly. I made the best decision of my life when I married him (xvi). Is this not Gangster Love, alas? That would be the love of a federal prosecutor under the new racial caste system or racialized system of control especially since Alexander will write that no one has more power in the criminal justice system than prosecutors (115), not even judges, some of whom no matter how conservative have resigned from the bench rather than collaborate with the grotesque prison politics of mandatory sentencing for the poor and Black or the non-rich and non-white (92-93)? The ruthless gangsterism of the establishment is no less a theme in Hip-Hop, or rap. The love of her life prosecutes for The New Jim Crow and has read and reread drafts of her book manuscript (xvi). What is the Old Jim Crow equivalent of being wedded or married to a federal prosecutor, while stigmatizing Hip-Hop or gangsta rap as a Minstrel Show (173-75), in one of the precious few representations of grassroots anything in The New Jim Crow?

Intellectually, it is not just a question of what Michelle Alexander does or does not know here, on the whole. She cites a lot of some scholars (or people) and kinds of work. What she doesnt seem to know may be a great deal, but what she doesnt want to know and what she doesnt want her audience to know is much greater. Original insight or info is in reality scarce in The New Jim Crow. Its hides from consumer view other work, activists and scholars more insightful and more radical or fearless. For anyone who could read across a range of relatively recent writings alone, like Elaine Browns The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2003); Katheryn K. Russells The Color of Crime (1998); Colin Dayans Story of the Cruel and Unusual (2004); Mumia Abu-Jamal or Dhoruba Bin Wahads contributions to Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (1993), just for example; beyond Angela Y. Daviss much-touted if ill-conceived Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), all of which are meticulously ignored by Alexander with current radical activism and all of the Black and non-Black radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, there is literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow. This book is not for everyone, indeed. Yet a lot of this everyone has been buying and supporting it, none the wiser, without raising adequate questions from the perspective of everyone, whose lives surely depend on raising questions under this cultural, political economic order of things. Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow is not for everyone because from cover to cover everyone except advocates of white and middle-class liberalism in the imperial context of U.S. settler nationalism are placed totally and completely beyond the pale. The soundtrack of Richard Wrights old protest, White Man, Listen! (1957), a virtual parody half a century ago, scratches pitifully in the background. Greg Thomas is an Associate Professor of Global Black Studies in the English Department at SU. He obtained a Ph.D from the Rhetoric Department at UC-Berkeley and an M.A. from the Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture Program at SUNY-Binghamton. Thomas is founder and editor of PROUD FLESH , an e-journal published by African Resource Center. He is also author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Indiana UP, 2007) as well as Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge and Pleasure in Lil Kims Lyricism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Currently, he is at work on a study of the intellectual politics of George L. Jackson, The Dragon. He can be reached at: gthomas@syr.edu