The Black middle and upper classes that expanded in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement (the movement that defeated the last outposts of legal Jim Crow) have been largely exempt from “the new Jim Crow.” Its victims are mostly removed from production even before they have been turned into recurrently warehoused raw material recycled in and out of a giant criminal injustice industrial complex whose subjects are not typically engaged in the capitalist production of commodities and surplus value.Ī third problem is that the Jim Crow system of formal segregation and political disenfranchisement applied to southern Blacks of all classes whereas the “new Jim Crow” system is imposed primarily on lower- and working-class Black Americans. The “new Jim Crow” is a largely post-industrial and post-productionist phenomenon.

The second hitch is that the Jim Crow system was part of a productionist regime dedicated to the mass exploitation of Black labor still yoked primarily to cotton. The first difficulty is that the real historical Jim Crow regime of the late 19 th and early 20 th century was specific to the South whereas the contemporary racist mass incarceration and criminal branding regime is nationwide. There were three key problems, however, with professor Alexander’s use of the term “Jim Crow” to describe that terrible system, even with the qualifier “new.” Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow is properly understood as a classic text on and against the regime of racist mass incarceration and criminal- (felony-) marking that arose and became deeply entrenched in the United States during the last third of the previous century.

“Forman traces the fateful role that pro- “law and order” Black Americans played in the creation of the wars on crimes and drugs that created contemporary racially hyper-disparate mass imprisonment and criminal marking.” The Abandonment: Reflections on James Foreman’s Locking Up Our Own by Paul Street James Forman’s new book is indispensable “for those who want to get the whole story on the rise of the “the New Jim Crow.” The Black middle and upper classes, which have been largely exempt from the mass Black incarceration regime, “actively participated in the rise of the racist mass incarceration and felony-branding system.” Blacks demanded both crackdowns on crime and a Marshall Plan for Black America – but got only tough crime laws.

Forman locking up our own