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Civil Rights activist Michelle Alexander discusses structural racism

Alan Zhou | Student Life
Michelle Alexander, author, lawyer, and prominent civil rights scholar, spoke to Washington University and St. Louis community members about racial segregation, mass incarceration, and policing during a conversation sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Feb. 28.
Alexander rose to national fame after the publication of her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which was published in 2010 and has since spent over 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The book describes how the War on Drugs and “Get Tough” movement of the 1990s led to the creation of a post-Jim Crow racial caste system in America. Alexander currently teaches at the Union Theological Seminary where she is also pursuing a Masters in Divinity and Inter-Religious Studies.
She said that she was first extensively exposed to the trauma that mass incarceration can inflict upon others, and the system of legalized segregation that impacts African American communities, when she served as the head of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California in the 1990s.
Alexander’s visit attracted the largest crowd in the Center’s history, filling up the entirety of Graham Chapel with hundreds in attendance and even more people watching via Zoom. Alexander received applause throughout her speech, with a standing ovation when she concluded her remarks.
To begin the discussion, Fannie Bialek, Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics, asked Alexander about how her book has impacted American society today.
Alexander described how the “colorblindness” of American society in the years during and following the presidency of President Barack Obama allowed for the issues addressed in her book to flourish.
“It was in this context that the politics of white supremacy and a backlash against the civil rights movement birthed the system of mass incarceration that met almost no resistance from the civil rights community,” she said.
Alexander recalled how her own views on race changed over time, and she recognized her own complicity in a system that was failing to accomplish its goals.
“It lit a fire within me to try to help other people [who] had the same political awakening that I did,” Alexander said. “In that sense, I had something of an evangelical fervor to use this book as a tool of awakening, in the hopes that we wouldn’t remain asleep to the crisis that was occurring on our watch.”
Initially on her activist journey, Alexander was enthralled by the fight for complete racial equality.
“I will say that when I was in college, I had a very naive, romantic idea of what civil rights lawyering was,” Alexander said.
As a law student, Alexander said she thought that people could bring about the end of racism in society, but decades later she realized that might not be possible.
“Pretty humbled by my naiveté and optimism, I realized that my motivation cannot be simply to win in the short term, or even in my lifetime,” Alexander said. “I don’t know whether it is possible to end racism in America. I don’t know, but my motivation has to come from somewhere else.”
Alexander also spoke about her personal move to spirituality and how that has reshaped her view of her past work.
“That is what this work is all about,” Alexander said. “My motivation really needed to come from a place of deep commitment to honor the dignity and value of each and every one of us no matter who we are, where we come from, and what we may have done — that has to be our motivation,”
“The New Jim Crow” heavily focused on mass incarceration, a subject that she also discussed during the event.
“[Mass incarceration] isn’t just some policy problem to be solved,” Alexander said. “It’s a symptom of our failure and our refusal as a nation to face our racial history and to overcome the politics of white supremacy, which have continued to birth to these caste systems again and again.”
Alexander’s book argues that the mass incarceration of African Americans is akin to a modern iteration of Jim Crow laws, as both are systems that sort people into different social classes based upon race.
Alexander mentioned that there are no national grassroots membership organizations focused on ending mass incarceration in America and warned the audience of the underlying danger of advocating for the use of police body cameras and monitoring systems in households.
“It’s very dangerous for us to imagine that technology is going to provide some type of solution to the problem of mass incarceration or the problem of racist, biased, violent policing,” Alexander said.
She said that advocates who initially pushed for this equipment did not realize that the technology can harm people of color.
“Who are these cameras filming really?” Alexander said. “These cameras now that many of us are begging officers to wear are filming everybody that [they] come into contact with all day long — so we basically argue that we should be under more surveillance; the police should be surveilling us all the time.”
She further emphasized how the “evidence” that activists conceived to be helpful might backfire against the already victimized.
“Every time they come into contact with us, they should be recording it, and guess how often that video gets used in trials? Hardly ever,” Alexander said. “How often does it get used in trials and in plea bargaining against people who have been arrested for minor crap that nobody should be going to jail for? All the time.”
After the event, Yinka Faleti, former Democratic nominee for Missouri Secretary of State and a WashU Law alumnus, said he was also one of the people who advocated for the use of body cams and electronic monitoring systems by police.
“We all thought, myself included, this technology would help, but Alexander flipped it on its head,” Faleti said.
Faleti and Alexander both cited the for-profit business model of private prisons as a reason for why this technology was abused by those private prison companies.
Alexander also talked at length about policing, describing it as “organized and state-sponsored violence” that we as a society choose to call justice.
She characterized policing as something that leads to brutal and visceral experiences for minorities and people of color. “Policing creates trauma for the individual, it creates trauma for families that entire communities feel the effects of.”
She said that changing policing is not just a matter of reformation, but of completely changing the way that we view the core ideas behind policing.
Derek Laney, a public organizer who attended the event, said he supported the movement for abolition. He said that when it comes to the police, “we do not need to reform; we need to rethink how we are being humans on the planet.”
Laney also said that police play two roles in society: “to quell dissent and protect rich peoples’ shit.”
He said he views poverty as a “genocide” upheld “by design” by rich people to oppress others.
Alexander described poverty as “a symptom of how capitalism functions in our society,” connecting it to the trauma brought on by violent policing.
Although Alexander said that solving contemporary issues of systemic racism is unlikely in her lifetime, she did convey a message of potential hope to the audience, explaining that potential solutions for these issues can eventually be enacted.
“Against all odds, we might find a way to build a multiracial, multiethnic democracy that truly honors the dignity and value of us all.”