The New Jim Crow Audiobook by Michelle Alexander [Free Download]

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

The readers can download The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Audiobook for free via Audible Free Trial.

Summary

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Audiobook by Michelle Alexander comes in a time where African Americans are successful in many areas in America society, as Barack Obama reached the Presidency of the Nation and Oprah Winfrey has proved her financial success in several business and ideas she has executed along her career. These two well-known names represent what some people tend to call the era of colorblindness where African American people can achieve goals easier than in the past. But for Professor Michelle Alexander, the methods of slavering have changed and now they are established in the Incarceration system.

Analyzing the story of African Americans since the colonies until the Clinton Administration, Professor Alexander outlines the different systems that have taken under control and the evolution of racial segregation from slavery in the colonies to the mass incarceration as the new system of social control.

Furthermore, Professor Alexander explains the scope of her work within the listeners of the audiobook and she establishes three audiences she wants to reach with this material. The first group is made of people really concerned about the racial issue but they do not have a clear idea of the crisis involved in mass incarceration of Afro-Americans. The second audience is composed by people who believe in the use of the criminal justice system as the new form of slavery in the country but they lack of evidence of this issue. And finally, she wants to reach the many people incarcerated in American jails.

She sustained that even though the reason and justifications for supporting racial exclusion and discrimination have varied along the time, but the results are similar to those in previous periods of American history.

Review

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Audiobook by Michelle Alexander gives through a historical recount of facts, the varied shapes slavery has taken in America society for the Afro-American population. Here analysis goes from exemplifying the models of segregation in the time of colonies, going through those times when African American were not allow to share the same bathroom, and she ended up mentioning how the American Justice system is the new way of segregation based on the “war on drugs” and other programs that are only related and based on the race of Afro-American communities, denying people convicted for these felonies “equal access to employment, housing, education, and other public benefits”.

Professor Alexander mentioned in her audiobook, narrated by Karen Chilton, how Americans in general know and don’t know about the situation in the jails all over the country. The simple idea of being colorblind about race is a way to cover this awful truth, a truth saying that there are “more African American…under correctional control today…than were enslaved in 1850”.

The interesting outcomes Professor Alexander reached, tries to change a reality affecting America nowadays and the listening of this audiobook would contribute to make that change effective.