War on drugs are the New Jim Crow Case Study

From the 1860’s up to now is the year in which Michelle Alexander focuses her book on. Alexander is a successful women who brought up the idea of change within the Jim Crow Law. Alexander proved too many organizations that change was to applied and that the unfairness with African Americans was too much. The book emphasizes many ideas and topics in which she experienced by working in the ACLU as well as other organizations. She shares everything she was able to witness and all the realizations she concluded after experiencing it. According to Alexander (2013), vagrancy laws as well as laws that were aimed at oppressing blacks in defining mischievous activities and insulting gestures were enforced to target the black community.

These laws were passed to lace black people at a point where their rights could be easily taken away from them. In the reconstruction era, Alexander notes that the laws passed were successful, with the philosophies presented to gain attention to many blacks sine it promised to be a success in ensuring protection to all blacks. As Alexander (2013) notes, Populists made important and great strides towards discrimination and racial integration: this showed their desire and commitment tohaving unity based on a class system. As much as the philosophy proved to be successful, this push made more whites to further segregate and discriminate the speed and the blacks were put back to their previous position. The Border States followed suit. The minstrel’s character name then became shorthand or these kinds of laws, etiquette and customs, which was segregated and demeaned the African Americans essentially from 1870s and into the 1960s.

The impact of the New Jim crow The War on Drugs is an American campaign of banning drugs, military aid, and military intervention that are anything related to illegal drug trade. After the first mention of the campaign by President Richard Nixon in 1971, the War on Drugs has become popularised and is now infused in the American society. Yet the issue has been generated that the War of Drugs is being specially critique on some minor racial groups, especially on the African Americans who live in the poorest neighbourhood in the country. This is the racial formation that the African Americans are undergoing. Though the number of drug usage is far larger among white Americans, for some reasons, the African Americans seems to receive more attention from the audience.

As it is said in the text, "Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offences have been black or Latino" (Alexander, 137). The effects that those African American prisoners receive in the future are great. Due to the long duration of imprisonment time, when they are finally liberated, they are no longer who they used to be. Starting from their ancestors who were slaves and to their current situation where they are still being discriminated, African Americans have always been the easiest target to be blamed. Due to this, it is not a hard task for other white Americans to blame the African Americans for something they did not do.

Nevertheless, the irony of America’s racism is that "Politicians and law enforcement officials today rarely endorse racially biased practices, and most of them fiercely condemn racial discrimination of any kind" (Alexander, 138). But how is it possible that there are so many innocent African Americans who are being arrested? According to a survey conducted in 1995, when one asked a random pedestrian the question: "Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?" (Alexander, 143), 95% of the respondents depicted a black drug user while only five percent pictured other racial groups. This is the reality of African American racism in America. Because African Americans have been the inferiority since the beginning, the society has embedded this racial group as the group that only need minimal equal protection as the others.

And now that the event clearly displayed that the Fourteenth Amendment, "the citizenship rights and the equal protection of the laws" (14th Amendment, 73), wouldn’t help them to get back their rights, before one starts a conversation about this issue whether the case is just or unjust, he/she needs to consider if the current laws and policies are treating all the minority groups in the same way as the majority group. Starting from there, one can realise that the issue now creates another issue that executing another law would really help the minority groups to be equal. The issue regarding the mass incarceration of people of colour has to remain significant for a long time because there always will be superior white supremacy officials who try to conceal the unjust events from surface rising.

Because of this, African Americans has always remained as minority and as the target of every brutal crimes while other minor racial groups, too, remain oblivious. Therefore another solution is needed for the cases which is education. Education is the most essential weapon and solution that people could depend on. Though children are taught in their schools that everyone is equal and racism shouldn’t exist, just notifying the children wouldn’t make a major change in our future. People need to be honest in our brutal human history because if we’re going to lie about our history, who else is going to be willing to find out the truth behind it? Hence though it might seem violent to the children, by educating them the reality of our minorities and their harsh lives, they can establish their morality towards difference races about their unproven stereotypes and their dominant ideology, a set of certain beliefs that one or more group of people believe in, that the society has generated.

As the rate of African Americans imprisonment is getting significantly larger than that of white American’s, the racial formation is, too, getting out of hands. The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965 to lift the barrier that had been placed to prevent blacks from voting (Alexander, 2013). The author cites cases such as the Brown v. Board of Education debate, as well as how Brown was aiming to bring an end to the vice of racial discrimination and segregation in schools in the South. This increased anger in the south, as the whites were fighting to have the Jim Crow laws come back into effect fully. In spite of the fact that Brown had made a clear point, new Jim Crow laws were adding to the list, which caused an eruption of violence, sporadically.

There are many things that are wrong if you are looking at it from a perspective as a regular American citizen or especially as if you are a minority in society today. They have been shunned away to basically nothing with no matter in the world because they have no political power in order to make a say in this situation. After all of this, anyone that has read this book hopefully will change their views and see that there actually is some wrong in our justice system and changes need to be made. Works cited Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander, Michelle. "The war on drugs and the New Jim Crow. " Race, Poverty, and the Environment 17 (2010): 75-77.