[act-ma] 12/06 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

[Charlie Welch]

http://www.lesley.edu/EventDetail.aspx?id=13636


    Part of the Emmanuel Levinas Lectures, Sponsored by the Psychology
    and the Other Institute at Lesley University

Friday, December 6, 2013.

7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

*/The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of 
Colorblindness/*challenges the conventional widson that with the 
election of Barack Obama as president, our nation has "triumphed over 
race." Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an 
astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in 
prisons or trapped in a permanent, second-class status, much like their 
grandparents before them who lived under an explicit system of racial 
control. Alexander argues that the sudden and dramatic mass 
incarceration of African-American men, primarily through the War on 
Drugs, has created a new racial under caste -- a group of people defined 
largely by race that is subject to legalized discrimination, scorn, and 
social exclusion.

The old forms of discrimination -- employment, housing, education, and 
public benefits; denial of the right to vote; and exclusion from jury 
service -- are suddenly legal once you're labeled a felon. She 
challenges the civil rights community, and all of us, to place mass 
incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in 
America.

*_About the Presenter_*
*Michelle Alexander* is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, 
advocate, and legal scholar who currently holds 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 the Kirwan 
Institute, Professor Alexander was an Associate Professor of Law at 
Stanford Law School, where she directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 
2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of 
her first book, /The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of 
Colorblindness /(The New Press, 2010). The book is considered one of the 
top African-American books of 2010 and it won the NAACP Image Award for 
"outstanding literary work of non-fiction." The book has been featured 
on national radio and television media outlets, including NPR, The Bill 
Moyers Journal, the Tavis Smiley Show, C-Span Washington Journal, among 
others.

Washburn Auditorium
Lesley University Brattle Campus
10 Phillips Place
Cambridge, MA 02138

For more information, contact David Goodman at dgoodman at lesley.edu 
<mailto:dgoodman at lesley.edu>.

*Cost:*Free and Open to the Public