Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a text I’ve come across many times over the years. In fact, I don’t know if there is a single time I have walked into a major bookstore and have not seen the book displayed in prominence on an end cap or center aisle table. I’ve encountered all the arguments made within the text over the years in articles, during debates, and in university classrooms as an undergraduate. Perhaps the significance of Alexander’s work is best assessed in the foreword by Cornel West: “The New Jim Crow is the secular bible for a new social movement in the early twenty-first-century America.” Although the data and arguments found within have been seen both before and after Alexander’s work, this is perhaps the most definitive and comprehensive work on the topic of Black crime and mass incarceration in America, as seen from the left.

The overarching premise is that mass incarceration, Jim Crow laws, and slavery have been the three primary measures adopted as public policy in the U.S. as a means to control the Black population. Several of Alexander’s contentions jumped off the page at me from the very beginning of the introduction, where she states that an essential goal of the Founding Fathers was to ensure citizenship to Blacks would be denied. In a way, I was thoroughly impressed, aghast even. I hear noxious phrases like “we are a nation of immigrants,” “America is for everybody,” and “this is a homeland for all,” almost daily, be it on social media, from politicians, the press, or in the media. And to see an author who has declared her goal is an “egalitarian democracy,” to be so honest, so frank, and so correct, is in many ways to be welcomed. Alexander displays from page one that she has a grasp of historical racialism as it pertains to the foundation of the U.S. and the Founders’ intentions. She finds this to be an unacceptable position, of course, but her admission that the U.S. was founded as a White nation is exceedingly rare nonetheless. Read more

Fifty years ago, a deadly urban riot began one hot summer night in my hometown of Detroit. It ignited around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of an illegal after-hours bar in the midst of an all-Black neighborhood that had been all-White 15 or 20 years before.

When the mayhem ended six nights later, 43 people had been killed, 1,189 injured, 7,231 arrested, 2,509 stores had been looted or burned, 690 buildings were destroyed or had to be demolished, and 388 families were displaced.

Detroit’s Mayor at the time was Jerome Cavanagh, a young, bright and ambitious liberal. Elected with near-unanimous support of Black voters, he had aggressively launched anti-poverty programs to make the nation’s fifth largest municipality a model of the Great Society’s War on Poverty. (1).

The rapid migration of American Blacks between 1940 and 1965 from the mostly rural South to the big cities of the North, very quickly increased the Black population from less than 10% to over 30% at the time of the riot. That meant that Detroit, which had about 150,000 Black residents before World War II, had about 600,000 a generation later. In the 1960’s Detroit was dealing with a larger influx of Southern Blacks than all but Chicago and New York.

Conditions of Detroit’s Black Community Before the Riot

Politically correct revisionist historians and sociologists (many of whom are Black) like to portray Detroit’s riot of 1967 as the inevitable rebellion of a people victimized by White racism.  However to maintain this typical liberal view one must dismiss many well established facts that contradict the narrative. Read more

If you read the links on previous posts you’ll find  ‘a lack of self-esteem’ adduced as one of the main explanations for low Black SAT scores. This is ridiculous on any number of counts, most obviously by avoiding the IQ elephant in the room. But where do they get the idea that Blacks have low self-esteem? In fact the contrary is the case, especially for the younger cohort for whom a preening swaggering bravado, totally unrelated to actual capabilities, is standard behaviour. And that’s not just my impression.

Bernadette Gray-Little, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, performed a complex review of every piece of research available on black self-esteem.’There have been inconsistencies in the results of the studies on this topic over time,’ says Gray-Little. ‘I wanted to see if I could find any basis for a firm conclusion. And if inconsistencies occurred, I wanted to know when and why.’ …

She found that before the age of 10, whites slightly surpass blacks in self-esteem. Everyone’s self-esteem dips in the later years of school. After that, blacks narrowly but consistently surpass whites, up to the age of 21, the upper limit of the study.

The self-esteem gap seems to depend on wealth. Low-income blacks show higher self-esteem than low-income whites. But the gap disap pears at higher income levels. The study also shows that black self-esteem has not risen over time. The theory of many psychologists was that as blacks gained in civil liberties, their self-esteem would rise. But the study shows it has never been low.

The report will confound black activists who have seen raising black self-esteem as the key to overcoming social disadvantage. At the all-black Paul Robeson Academy in Detroit, students start the day by standing up and proclaiming: ‘I feel like somebody. I act like somebody. Nobody can make me feel like a nobody!’

In Britain, many companies now have mentoring schemes to help people from ethnic minorities. The Millennium Commission is funding a three-year programme to expand such schemes.

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