I thought that this would be of particular interest to readers of this blog. There is a special radio event that airs tonight on WBAI which will bring together Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander. Here is the description of the program:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Guests: Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and litigator, author and Angela Davis, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
with
— Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and litigator, author
— Angela Davis, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a leading advocate in the movement to end the prison-industrial complex.

Alexander offers a bold and innovative argument that mass incarceration amounts to a devastating system of racial control. “Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.”

In her incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. Angela Davis explores the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She urges us to think seriously about a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

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Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
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