The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Hussien Nasser
AFAM 2100
Professor Young
23 February 2017

1. According to Alexander, what is the reason for racial caste systems?

    The reason for the racial caste system is when white individuals feel superior while blacks individuals feel inferior. Since this mindset and idea has been enforced into people due to slavery, people begin to believe and accept this idea, whether or not it is true. The racial caste system has also created a ranking system within minority groups, distinguishing African Americans, Latinos, and other Hispanic minority groups. Nonetheless, it has basically dehumanized African Americans. It has made African Americans to feel as nothing in society and always being overwhelmed not knowing if they will survive in this society and system that African Americans have been forced into. 

2. Discuss racial bribe.

    Racial bribe is when superior people use other racial classes such as poor whites and Native Americans as a strategic way to get to African Americans and dehumanize them. For example, in Chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, she mentions how the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them an black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to the Native Americans lands. White servants were then allowed to police slaves through patrols, militias, and barriers that was created so free labor would not be in competition with slave labor. racial bribe is a method used so whites can take advantage of not only African Americans but other settlements, creating conflict and other factors that would cause whites to intervene and take control. 

3. Since the nation’s founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time…Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarch search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined.  It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.

  

   The above statement sums up the idea that every time slavery is abolished, it is transformed and reborned in a different way. For example, The New Jim Crow Era, Black Codes, Law and order, War on Drugs, and mass incarceration was a way slavery was reborned and reborned to still exist. All of which continued segregation and discrimination towards African Americans. In The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander she mentions the term backlash and the strategy used by whites to take away the progress of African Americans/ When blacks are succeeding or on the path to living a comfortable life, whites find a way to limit their progress.

     

4.  What is the Southern Manifesto and who drafted it?

      The Southern Manifesto, drafted by Sam Ervin Jr., a racist polemic, was a vow to fight to maintain Jim Crow by all legal means. With the support of 101 out of  128 members of Congress, the expectation was definitely a negative one. Almost fifty new Jim Crow laws were passed, the Ku Klux Klan become more powerful and ruthless, and many bombing of black home and churches. There was a rage of terror and hatred towards African Americans and with only the NAACP in existence to fight for colored people, it was difficult for change to occur.

5.   What limits did Clinton impose on those receiving TANF?

     President Clinton implemented many limits on those who were receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). One limit was referred to as "One Strike and You're Out Initiative". People who commit a crime and are peddled with drugs show be included in this category. People found with drugs would receive a lifetime ban on their eligibility for welfare, food stamps, and can no longer receive public housing An African Americans life basically taken away from a simple possession of marijuana charge. All of these laws put into place like the War on Drugs are targeted to get African Americans into prison and to serve as slaves, a continuation of blacks being dehumanized.