First Posted: 4/1/2015
LIMA — According to Michelle Alexander, there’s a new Jim Crow to think about.
The associate professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and a previous member of the Stanford Law School faculty as the director of the Civil Rights Clinic, discusses the topic in her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
The book challenges the idea that society has entered into an age of colorblindness as black men have been targeted in the War on Drugs and other issues through America’s criminal justice system, identifying a new more modern system of racial control.
“We have not ended racial caste in America,” Alexander said. “We have merely redesigned it.”
In the interest of continuing the conversation, Alexander visited the campus at Ohio State University-Lima after the college’s Honors Program read her book in its honor book seminar.
“Michelle Alexander’s work is groundbreaking in the sense that it gets at the root of social injustice in contemporary America,” said David Adams, director of the Honors Program and associate professor of English at Ohio State University-Lima. “Our hope is that her visit will begin a constructive dialogue across the campus and throughout the community.”
Of the years, Alexander has had multiple experiences in the civil rights field through advocacy and litigated, including civil rights cases in private practice and the nonprofit sector, as well. She also served as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California as she worked on a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. While an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak and Baller, Alexander focused her efforts in plaintiff-side class action lawsuits regarding race and gender discrimination.
