A review by aoutrance
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

"The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal—one at a time, through disconnected advocacy strategies—seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than a deeply flawed public consensus, one that is indifferent, at best, to the experience of poor people of color. [...] Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial."

One of my biggest take aways from this book, outside of the truly horrifying recounting of America's racism, is that reform should be consciously movement-building in order to achieve forward motion. It taught me that challenging legal routes and financial backers are not the (only) way to change, because it will just perpetuate new forms of the same systems of control.