Powerful Radio Program on Voting Rights, Mass Incarceration, and Race

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness with Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and litigator, author
 
Alexander offers a bold and innovative argument that mass incarceration amounts to a devastating system of racial control. 

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.â€ 

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.

To Download or listen to this 27:30 minute program visit Here or Here.
www.buildingbridgesradio.org 

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Thanks to KFTC member Janet Tucker for discovering this.