“If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: accept none of us or all of us.” p. 321
When we left off last week, Prof. Alexander was discussing how “colorblindness,” although it sounds ideal, is problematic because it keeps us from seeing systemic racism and allows us to be indifferent to the harms caused by ongoing racial divisions. In fact, we need to mindful of color and its many ramifications.
Having set out her argument that accounting for color is necessary, Prof. Alexander then offers a caveat: accounting for color may result in “racial bribes” that placate people and interfere with structural change. Has affirmative action created enough of an appearance of diversity that calls for deeper change go unheeded? Prof. Alexander sees civil rights activists as too entrenched in the status quo of their fight for diversity in education and employment that they have become disconnected from the people trapped in the racial undercaste. Given the success of people like Oprah, Barack Obama, and Colin Powell, it is easy to believe that the incarcerated are in prison only because of their poor choices rather than anything to do with their color.
Prof. Alexander goes on to problematize affirmative action as lending credence to a “trickle down” theory of racial justice. She points to the example of police departments. Affirmative action has brought considerable change to the racial make-up of many police departments, and many police chiefs are black. One might think that this would result in changes to law enforcement, but in fact the role of police in our society and the rules of policing have not changed. Prof. Alexander sees nothing trickling down because people who benefit from affirmative action have much to lose and little to gain by challenging the system. Similarly, as president, Obama made challenges to systemically-biased law enforcement programs difficult when he, a Black man, supported them.
In these closing pages of her book, Prof. Alexander reminds us that class is an important factor if we are to dismantle mass incarceration in such a way that we do not end up replacing it with another racialized caste system. Poor and lower class whites have too often been pitted against blacks to prevent the formation of a unified group ready to demand economic change. Instead, we must have a movement built on care for all people of every class and color. As Martin Luther King, Jr., often said, what we need is more than civil rights; we must manifest human rights.
Before closing with a powerful quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Prof. Alexander warns that, if and when we dismantle mass incarceration, the people who have been locked up and locked out may confront us with rage. Instead of marginalizing that rage,
when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. p. 324
What truth will you speak?