Many of the forms of discrimination we considered left behind in the Jim Crow Era are legal again once you’ve been branded a criminal, says Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness. These include being denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, and access to public education– all public benefits.
In this 2010 “Moyers Moment” from Bill Moyers Journal, Alexander talks about the “system of laws, policies, and practices in the United States today that operate to lock people of color, particularly poor people of color, living in ghetto communities, in an inferior second-class status for life.”
Alexander currently holds a joint appointment with Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity where she teaches courses regarding race, civil rights and criminal justice.
Watch the entire conversation between Bill Moyers, Michelle Alexander and civil rights advocate Bryan Stevenson.
