Kimberly’s Reviews > The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness > Status Update

“White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

We should not hope for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous that sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous that sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity-Martin Luther King, Jr.

More African American adults are under correctional control today-in prison or in jail, on probation or parole-than were enslaved in 1850.

As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

It is important to keep in mind that many rappers and hip hop artists do not aim to glorify or romanticize gangsta life or culture. They are simply telling the truth about their experience, in their own way, in their own voice.

The worst of gangsta rap and blaxploitation (such as VH1’s Flavor of Love) is a modern-day minstrel Is a for-profit display of the worst racial stereotypes and images associated with the era of mass incarceration- where black people are criminalized and portrayed as out of control, shameless, violent, oversexed, and generally undeserving.

For those black youth who are constantly followed by the police and shamed by teachers, relatives, and strangers, embracing the stigma of criminality is an act of rebellion-an attempt to carve out a positive identity in a society that offers them little ore than scorn, contempt, and constant surveillance.

Poor people of color, like other Americans, want safe streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that families struggling in ghetto neighborhoods do not want those things, and are instead perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities feeling no shame or regret, is, quite simply, racist.