Talk:The New Jim Crow

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• Some scholars have criticized Alexander for misrepresenting the problem of mass-incarceration in the United States by augmenting and "repackaging" existing social justice research on mass-incarceration to suit white middle-class consumers. Such critics have argued that Alexander creates a strained analogy to the original Jim Crow laws, employs a counterrevolutionary conceptual framework, and marginalizes black and brown voices in favor of more mainstream and less radical perspectives. These critics agree that mass incarceration in the United States is a catastrophic situation, but disagree with Alexander with regard to its history, causes, and possible solutions .

Recuperative and counterrevolutionary tendencies

The discourse of The New Jim Crow has been noted for its recuperative tendencies:

In one study, political sociologist Joseph D. Osel writes that The New Jim Crow is an "exceptional example of recuperation." According to his study the book promotes a false understanding of mass incarceration in the United States. He observes that The New Jim Crow "paradoxically excludes an analysis of mass incarceration's most central and defining factors," "omits all truly revolutionary stances from its discourse" (especially those of African Americans), "quietly denies the relevance of controversial American history," and "engages in a paradoxical counterrevolutionary protest that misleads readers about the context, causes and possible remedial methods of mass-incarceration in the United States." To support his disputed contention Osel cites several contradictions from the text, including that the book does not contain the word "capitalism." He writes: "The New Jim Crow is a book about a modern American "caste system" without even a single reference to the modern economic paradigm," noting that "the particular omissions and critical immunizations in The New Jim Crow serve to limit the discursive consciousness of the potential revolutionary subject" and that this limitation "runs contrary to the actual needs of the subject(s) under consideration."

In conclusion, Osel writes that social justice advocates should be deeply concerned about The New Jim Crow's wide acclaim and argues that a détournement of the text's "commercial misinformation and half-truths" could salvage the book as an instructive category of race relations, providing readers with "a powerful lens through which we could view the strange depths and modes of ideological domination and rhetorical schisms, which sustain societal problems even while challenging them." In his initial review of the book he also notes that The New Jim Crow lacks perspective on the larger systems of capitalism, colonialism, and racism that generate mass incarceration—partly, because Alexander's audience would be uncomfortably complicit with these systems.

References

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