The New Jim Crow

by

Michelle Alexander

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Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Justice vs. the Law Theme Icon
The Illusion of Progress Theme Icon
Racial Castes, Stereotypes, and Hierarchies Theme Icon
Violence, Surveillance, and Social Control Theme Icon
Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The New Jim Crow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy Theme Icon

In the introduction to the book, Alexander admits that when she first encountered the argument that mass incarceration was a continuation of slavery and Jim Crow, it sounded like a conspiracy theory that would hinder rather than help the fight for racial justice. However, in the ten years following that first encounter, her opinion shifted drastically. The book shows that the phenomenon of mass incarceration is indeed something of a white supremacist conspiracy. The myths upon which this conspiracy is based are so deeply entrenched in society that even Alexander herself—an African-American lawyer and civil rights advocate dedicated to advancing racial justice—spent much of her career believing they were legitimate.

There are countless examples of myths and lies that comprise the conspiracy of mass incarceration. The use of race-neutral rhetoric to discuss the criminal justice system is dangerously dishonest considering the extent to which mass incarceration disproportionately affects black and Latino communities. Furthermore, language such as “law and order” is used to disguise mass incarceration as a positive and necessary social policy, rather than a brutal means of oppressing and controlling black people. Alexander argues that the claim that the Civil Rights Movement was supposedly a threat to “law and order” proves that law and order was in fact a kind of code for white supremacy. Meanwhile, another myth holds that crime is fostered by black culture, rather than poverty, lack of opportunities, and social alienation. Although this myth has existed since black people were first brought to America, it took off in the 1970s in a way that laid foundations for the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs in turn misconstrued facts about the problems of drugs and crime, exaggerating the threat they posed and disproportionately blaming them on African-American communities. Furthermore, Reagan’s government deliberately utilized propaganda in order to perpetuate these myths and increase support for the “tough” approach to drugs and crime.

In many ways, The New Jim Crow functions as a kind of antidote to the myth, dishonesty, and conspiracy on which mass incarceration is based. Whereas the myths Alexander cites have their basis in prejudice rather than reality, Alexander herself uses a range of scholarly methods—including archival evidence, statistical analysis, and anecdotes—in order to prove her points. The amount of evidence contained within the book hints at the difficulty of undoing the myths that prop up the system of mass incarceration. Even as Alexander provides overwhelming evidence of the injustice present within contemporary American society, the myths and dishonesty that produce this injustice may well endure as the more powerful force.

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Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy appears in each chapter of The New Jim Crow. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy Quotes in The New Jim Crow

Below you will find the important quotes in The New Jim Crow related to the theme of Myth, Dishonesty, and Conspiracy.
Introduction Quotes

Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination––employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service––are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

For me, the new caste system is now as obvious as my own face in the mirror. Like an optical illusion––one in which the embedded image is impossible to see until its outline is identified––the new caste system lurks invisibly within the maze of rationalizations we have developed for persistent racial inequality. It is possible––quite easy, in fact––never to see the embedded reality. Only after years of working on criminal justice reform did my own focus finally shift, and then the rigid caste system slowly came into view. Eventually it became obvious. Now it seems odd that I could not see it before.

Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

The concept of race is a relatively recent development. Only in the past few centuries, owing largely to European imperialism, have the world's people been classified along racial lines. Here, in America, the idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery––as well as the extermination of American Indians––with the ideals of freedom preached by whites in the new colonies.

Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the basic structure of American society. The structure and content of the original Constitution was based largely on the effort to preserve a racial caste system––slavery––while at the same time affording political and economic rights to whites, especially propertied whites.

Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:

Under the terms of our country's founding document, slaves were defined as three fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being. Upon this racist fiction rests the entire structure of American democracy.

Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

Genuine equality for black people, King reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country. Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C. thousands of the nation's disadvantaged, in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans, to demand jobs and income––the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors.

Related Characters: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

During Clinton's tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation's main housing program for the urban poor.”

Related Characters: Bill Clinton
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Anyone driving more than a few blocks is likely to commit a traffic violation of some kind, such as failing to track properly between lanes, failing to stop at

precisely the correct distance behind a crosswalk, failing to pause for precisely the right amount of time at a stop sign, or failing to use a turn signal at the appropriate distance from an intersection. Allowing the police to use minor traffic violations as a pretext for baseless drug investigations would permit them to single out anyone for a drug investigation without any evidence of illegal drug activity whatsoever. That kind of arbitrary police conduct is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.

Page Number: 67-68
Explanation and Analysis:

As legal scholar David Cole has observed, “in practice, the drug-courier profile is a scattershot hodgepodge of traits and characteristics so expansive that it potentially justifies stopping anybody and everybody.” The profile can include traveling with luggage, traveling without luggage, driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs repairs, driving with out-of-state license plates, driving a rental car, driving with “mismatched occupants,” acting too calm, acting too nervous, dressing casually, wearing expensive clothing or jewelry, being one of the first to deplane, being one of the last to deplane, deplaning in the middle, paying for a ticket in cash, using large-denomination currency, using small-denomination currency, traveling alone, traveling with a companion, and so on.

Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:

Property or cash could be seized based on mere suspicion of illegal drug activity, and the seizure could occur without notice or hearing, upon an ex parte showing of mere probable cause to believe that the property had somehow been “involved” in a crime. The probable cause showing could be based on nothing more than hearsay, innuendo, or even the paid, self-serving testimony of someone with interests clearly adverse to the property owner.

Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

It is the genius of the new system of control that it can always be defended on nonracial grounds, given the rarity of a noose or a racial slur in connection with any particular criminal case. Moreover, because blacks and whites are almost never similarly situated (given extreme racial segregation in housing and disparate life experiences), trying to “control for race” in an effort to evaluate whether the mass incarceration of people of color is really about race or something else––anything else––is difficult.

Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living “free” in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow. Those released from prison on parole can be stopped and searched by the police for any reason––or no reason at all––and returned to prison for the most minor of infractions, such as failing to attend a meeting with a parole officer. Even when released from the system's formal control, the stigma of criminality lingers. Police supervision, monitoring, and harassment are facts of life not only for all those labeled criminals, but for all those who “look like” criminals. Lynch mobs may be long gone, but the threat of police violence is ever present. A wrong move or sudden gesture could mean massive retaliation by the police.

Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:

No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.

Page Number: 158
Explanation and Analysis:

One need not be formally convicted in a court of law to be subject to this shame and stigma. As long as you "look like" or "seem like" a criminal, you are treated with the same suspicion and contempt, not just by police, security guards, or hall monitors at your school, but also by the woman who crosses the street to avoid you and by the store employees who follow you through the aisles, eager to catch you in the act of being the “criminalblackman”––the archetypal figure who justifies the New Jim Crow.

Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:

Poor people of color, like other Americans––indeed like nearly everyone around the world––want safe streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that ghetto families do not, in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their young men is, quite simply, racist.

Page Number: 170
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who have defied the odds and risen to power, fame, and fortune.

Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:

In ghetto communities, nearly everyone is either directly or indirectly subject to the new caste system. The system serves to redefine the terms of the relationship of poor people of color and their communities to mainstream, white society, ensuring their subordinate and marginal status. The criminal and civil sanctions that were once reserved for a tiny minority are now used to control and oppress a racially defined majority in many communities, and the systematic manner in which the control is achieved reflects not just a difference in scale. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. Prior drug wars were ancillary to the prevailing caste system. This time the drug war is the system of control.

Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Colorblindness, though widely touted as the solution, is actually the problem... colorblindness has proved catastrophic for African Americans.

Page Number: 240
Explanation and Analysis: