Structure and Rhetorical Strategy in "The New Jim Crow" Olivia Roberts College

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander delves into the troublesome topic of social control mechanisms through the lens of race. Alexander, a professor of law at Ohio State University and joint-appointee at the Kirwan Institute of Race and Ethnicity, covers extensively the ways in which society has evolved from slavery, to Jim Crow, to a present-day social control mechanism: mass incarceration. Her background in law and as the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in California gave her ample experience in the field, only furthering her argument. Readers are taken through the history and different faces of racial profiling in the United States, all building up to the most recent. In six chapters, Alexander develops and extensively supports her central thesis: A quasi-racial caste system has arisen in the United States, akin to the outdated mechanisms of slavery and Jim Crow.

In the first chapter, “The Rebirth of Caste,” Alexander traces the path of social mechanisms back to the very beginning: slavery. She provides great detail on the American ideal of what was essentially “Manifest Destiny”, desiring to take and own whatever was in sight for the betterment of one’...