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

Date: February 18, 2010

Time: 6:00 PM

220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York NY 10001

A year after the election of President Obama, America still has a long road to achieving a post-racial society, and nowhere is this more apparent than in our broken prison system. Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Metropolitan Black Bar Association, and The New Press are proud to invite you to a forum with legal scholar Michelle Alexander to discuss her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander argues in this comprehensive analysis of America's racial history that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Jim Crow and legal racial segregation, she asserts, have been replaced by mass incarceration as "a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control."

Join us for a discussion with Alexander on the long-term costs of this mass incarceration, exacerbated by a system that legally permits the formerly incarcerated to be discriminated against for the rest of their lives, and leaves them without adequate employment, housing, education, and public benefits. In a society in which colorblindness seems to have pervaded the national discourse, Alexander seeks to ensure that our vision of injustice is not blurred, and that we can foster a frank discussion about race, cultivate an ethic of compassion for all, and end the practices of mass incarceration that institutionalize racism in America.

A wine and cheese reception will follow the discussion.

About the Author:

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded the national campaign against racial profiling. She has clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, and appeared as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC. She is currently a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

This event will be webcast live at www.demos.org.

To RSVP, click here, or contact Jinny Khanduja at jkhanduja@demos.org or 212.389.1399.

Read: American Furies | CONNED | Keeping Down the Black Vote | A Prison is Not a Home: The Lesson of People v. Cady