Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University. Previously, she was a member of the faculty of Stanford Law School, and director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. Her first book is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Before speaking at Zócalo at the Hammer, she told us a bit more about herself.
Michelle Alexander spent years as a civil rights lawyer, believing that the criminal justice system, like other American institutions, was “infected with a conscious and unconscious bias” against people of color. It wasn’t until her years working on racial profiling, drug enforcement and police brutality that she realized it was “a different beast entirely.”
by Candace Black
My brother built a fort in the ancient one
at Whitehead and Eaton.
Hidden by dense leaves and tortured
branches, he’d startle
Decades have passed since the civil rights legislation and the Supreme Court overturned Jim Crow laws, which had prevented African Americans from becoming full and equal participants in political life since the end of the Civil War. But have they returned in a new guise? Michelle Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, initially thought activists who saw vestiges of Jim Crow in present-day institution were, in a word, crazy. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, she recalls thinking, “The criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you’re crazy.” Alexander, who visits Zócalo on Wednesday, soon came to believe differently. Below, she explains her argument and how she came around to support it.
Ted Conover, born in Okinawa and raised mostly in Colorado, has spent a lot of time on the road. For Coyotes and Rolling Nowhere, he traveled across the country with migrant workers and the homeless. And for The Routes of Man, Conover logged a total of 15 months’ time abroad, shuttling between his New York City home and Peru, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. “From the moment my parents let me take long-distance bike rides, travel for me was a way of being independent, of having self-determination and also as a way of educating myself,” he said. Read more about him below.
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