A Harsh critique from a Radical perspective. Greg Thomas professor of Global Black Studies in Syracuse University delivers a reality check to the liberalism of Alexanders The New Jim Crow. While it should acknowledged that The New Jim Crow has done much to bring attention to mass-incarceration of Black/Brown people in the Post Racial Obama era one struggling for liberation past the bourgeois status quo should pay close attention. Much was not only missed but conceptually empty in regards to the oppression of Afro-americans and the nature of White-Power Imperialist Capitalism. In the end, a Marxist (a Radical) and a Liberal can observe the same social phenomena. (a homeless person, mass-incarceration of ethnic minorities, the commodification of womens bodies etc;), but the difference comes down to theory and class perspective. A Liberal says, the System ISNT Working- the Marxist says, the System IS Working just fine. ~ K.Vasquez ************************************************ Intellectually, it is not just a question of what Michelle Alexander does or does not know here, on the whole. She cites a lot of some scholars (or “people”) and kinds of work. What she doesn’t seem to know may be a great deal, but what she doesn’t want to know and what she doesn’t want her audience to know is much greater. Original insight or info is in reality scarce in The New Jim Crow. Its hides from consumer view other work, “activists” and scholars more insightful and more radical or fearless. For anyone who could read across a range of relatively recent writings alone, like Elaine Brown’s The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2003); Katheryn K. Russell’s The Color of Crime (1998); Colin Dayan’s Story of the Cruel and Unusual (2004); Mumia Abu-Jamal or Dhoruba Bin Wahad’s contributions to Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (1993), just for example; beyond Angela Y. Davis’s much-touted if ill-conceived Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), all of which are meticulously ignored by Alexander with current radical “activism” and all of the Black and non-Black radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s, there is literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow. “This book is not for everyone,” indeed. Yet a lot of this “everyone” has been buying and supporting it, none the wiser, without raising adequate questions from the perspective of “everyone,” whose lives surely depend on raising questions under this cultural, political economic order of things. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is not for “everyone” because from cover to cover “everyone” except advocates of white and middle-class liberalism – in the imperial context of U.S. settler nationalism – are placed totally and completely beyond the pale. ~ Greg Thomas; Why Some Like the New Jim Crow So Much
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 17:38:23 +0000
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