[act-ma] 4/25 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: Authors Discussion

[Charlie Welch]

Michelle Alexander: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of 
Colorblindness"

Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 6:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 2019, Harvard Law School
1585 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA

A discussion with author *Michelle Alexander*.


In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to 
use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, 
and social contempt. Yet, as legal star *Michelle Alexander* reveals, 
today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals 
in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against 
African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of 
discrimination---employment discrimination, housing discrimination, 
denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial 
of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury 
service---are suddenly legal.

Featured on the The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy 
Now!, and C-Span's Washington Journal, /The New Jim Crow/ has become an 
overnight phenomenon, sparking a much-needed conversation about ways in 
which our system of mass incarceration has come to resemble systems of 
racial control from a different era.

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, 
and legal scholar. As an associate professor of law at Stanford Law 
School, she directed the Civil Rights Clinic and pursued a research 
agenda focused on the intersection of race and criminal justice. In 
2005, Alexander won a Soros Justice Fellowship that supported the 
writing of The New Jim Crow and accepted a joint appointment at the 
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz 
College of Law at The Ohio State University. Prior to joining academia, 
Alexander engaged in civil rights litigation in both the private and 
nonprofit sector, ultimately serving as the director of the Racial 
Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she helped 
lead a national campaign against racial profiling. Currently she devotes 
her time to freelance writing, public speaking, consulting, and caring 
for her three young children.

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt 
University. She has clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. 
Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the D.C. Circuit of the 
U.S. Court of Appeals, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN and 
MSNBC, among other media outlets./The New Jim Crow/ is her first book. 
For more information, visit www.thenewjimcrow.com 
<http://www.thenewjimcrow.com>.

*Co-sponsored by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Prison Studies Project*


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