On the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, Democracy Now! hosts a wide-ranging discussion with authors, attorneys, and law professors Michelle Alexander and Randall Robinson about the mass incarceration of African-Americans.This plan, already put into action, has rolled back many of the achievements of the civil rights movement.
Today there are more African-Americans enduring modern slavery by being placed under correctional control -- whether in prison, jail, probation, or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850.
And more African-American men have been reduced to traumatized, suspect, non-voting, non-working "outcast" status because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.
The US once kidnapped and enslaved humans. Rather than abolishing the practice, it simply switched tactics, colonizing weaker nations and incarcerating Americans (ministerfaust).
Prof. Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is newly released in paperback, argues that:
"Nothing less than a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America or inspiring a recommitment to [Martin Luther] King's dream...
"My view is that this has got to be a human rights movement. It’s got to be a movement for education, not incarceration; for jobs, not jails; a movement that acknowledges the basic humanity and dignity of all people, no matter who you are or what you have done." More
- Book interview with Michelle Alexander
- The Debt: What America Owes...
- Guantanamo at 10: The Prisoner and the Prosecutor
- Why the [US] Empire Hates Haiti, Part 1
- But what about all the black RAPISTS?
- The mass incarceration of black men in US
- Arguing with white racists like a white racist
- Was the assassination of MLK, Jr. a conspiracy?
- SPECIAL: Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. in his own words
