The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

In the final chapter Alexander looks to the future of civil rights activism in the era of mass incarceration. She is disheartened by the fact that major protest and activist movements are rarely mobilized except in response to overt racism. She points to the outpouring of support for the Jena 6, a group of Black teenagers in Louisiana charged with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight instigated by a white classmate hanging nooses in a tree. Alexander suggests that if there was no explicitly racist imagery like nooses associated with the case, it would not have attracted as much attention. She then questions where the protesters and civil rights leaders were for the countless other children tried as adults for minor drug crimes.

While Alexander considers the silence and denial over the racial component of mass incarceration forgivable though inexcusable in everyday Americans, she is puzzled by the silence of civil rights activists. She suggests that modern advocacy may be ill-suited to addressing mass incarceration because, in the years following the Brown decision and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, a widespread perception emerged that civil rights lawyers were the most important agents of reform, as they brought the fight out of the streets and into the courtroom.