Pubdate: Sun, 09 Dec 2012
Source: Traverse City Record-Eagle (MI)
Copyright: 2012 The Traverse City Record-Eagle
Contact: http://www.record-eagle.com/opinion/local_story_128175513.html
Website: http://www.record-eagle.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1336
Author: Jack Lessenberry
Page: 5B

CONS, EX-CONS: NEW UNDERCLASS

You might think last month's presidential election proved one thing: 
That there are no longer any racial barriers to success in America.

But last weekend, author Michelle Alexander came to Detroit and told 
a spellbound audience that while she once shared that illusion, this 
happy image is anything but true. Instead, in a powerful speech and a 
best-selling book, she argues that America has created a new "racial 
caste system that is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow."

Now a law professor at Ohio State University, she told a posh banquet 
in Detroit's Renaissance Center that we've created a 
military-industrial-prison system "based on the mass incarceration of 
poor people of color, particularly black men."

Her theory - which she said she herself rejected a decade ago - is 
that "we haven't ended racial caste in America, we have merely 
redesigned it." Today, as she sees it, "poor folks of color are 
shuttled from rundown and underfunded schools to brand-new, high-tech 
prisons - and then out to life as a permanent undercaste."

Permanent, because in many states felons can be forever denied the 
right to vote. They can also be "automatically excluded from juries 
and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to 
education and public benefits." Even if legal barriers don't exist, 
the chance of a poorly educated black man with a criminal record 
succeeding in life is abysmally low. Nor are we talking about a small 
number of people.

"In many large cities, including Detroit, the majority of working age 
African-American men now have criminal records and are thus subject 
to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives," she said.

"This is reality," she added, "and nobody, not in Congress, not 
President Barack Obama, is talking about this."

But she is. Last year, Alexander started a ferocious debate with her 
book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of 
Colorblindness." Edition after edition sold out. On Dec. 2, the 
author was the keynote speaker at the annual Peace and Justice 
banquet sponsored by Detroit's Central United Methodist Church.

Most big cities have a church whose religion is mainly social 
activism, and in Detroit, Central United, led by the Rev. Ed Rowe, 
has long been that place.

Visitors to the church are more likely to stumble over a welfare 
rights demonstration than choir practice.

The crowd, heavy on activists and labor leaders, can sometimes be 
boisterous. But this year, when the tiny, delicately attractive law 
professor spoke, you could have heard a pin drop.

Among those listening raptly was a black middleaged woman dressed in 
blue. "I am here for my son," Sybrina Fulton told me. "His name was 
Trayvon Martin." Trayvon became a national figure after the unarmed 
black teen was shot to death in Florida last February.

Though she herself is black, Michelle Alexander has spent her life 
far removed from the world of the permanent underclass.

She grew up middle class, the daughter of an Oregon marketing 
executive. Alexander has degrees from Vanderbilt and Stanford 
Universities, and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry 
Blackmun before becoming a plaintiff's attorney and then a law 
professor. Tiny and elegant, she looks far younger than her 45 years.

Originally, she thought that while there were certainly built-in 
racial biases in the system, it was possible for anyone to succeed. 
But gradually, while working with an ACLU racial justice project, she 
came to believe that the "war on drugs" really was a successful 
attempt to impose a new system of "well-disguised, racialized social 
control" to keep people oppressed.

Her theory is not without controversy, even in the black community. 
Among those who disagree is Carter Stewart, the U.S. District 
Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. He also happens to be 
Michelle Alexander's husband, and best friend.

But there were few dissenters Sunday in Detroit.

When she finished, U.S. Rep. John Conyers just said "wow."

"You know, many authors can't speak, but she blew me away," said 
Conyers, who has represented Detroit in Congress since 1965. When 
asked if he thought what she said was true, he said, "of course it 
is. How do you think things got this way?"

"What do you think has been going on all these years?"
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom