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<td class="item_title">Michelle Alexander: "The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"</td>
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<td>Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 6:00 PM<br>
Wasserstein Hall, Room 2019, Harvard Law School<br>
1585 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA</td>
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<td>A discussion with author <strong>Michelle Alexander</strong>.<br>
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<br>
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 <strong>Michelle Alexander</strong> 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. <br>
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Featured on the The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal,
Democracy Now!, and C-Span’s Washington Journal, <em>The
New Jim Crow</em> 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. <br>
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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. <br>
<br>
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.<em> The New Jim Crow</em> is her first book.
For more information, visit <a
href="http://www.thenewjimcrow.com">www.thenewjimcrow.com</a>.<br>
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<strong>Co-sponsored by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the
Prison Studies Project</strong></td>
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