Michelle Alexander flashed a nervous look at her father from the passenger seat of their family car. Behind them, blue lights flashed, lighting up her father’s hands gripping the steering wheel as he eased the car over in what had become a routine occurrence for the young father.
Now parked on the side of the road, the father-daughter duo waited with trepidation for the police officer who had pulled them over to walk up to the driver’s side window and request proof of insurance and identification.
Early Life
Alexander was born on October 7, 1967, in Chicago, Illinois, to mixed race parents John and Sarah Alexander.
Experiencing injustice through the all-seeing eyes of childhood innocence, Alexander learned early that when she rode shotgun with her White mother no lights flashed and no sirens ever sounded.
Though she recognized the pattern, Alexander could not put words to it, and she could not understand why her Black father was repeatedly pulled over for traffic stops while her white mother was not.
Seeing clearly
Alexander attended college at Vanderbilt University before going on to become a former ACLU Racial Justice Project director.
While at ACLU, Alexander had a chance to finally look at the numbers, and the reality of her childhood became horrifyingly clear. Not just because of the racism she witnessed her father experience firsthand, but she understood for the first time the same racism that caused her father to be pulled over for nonexistent traffic violations, effected the population of black Americans disproportionately nationwide. Her father was not alone.
Plunging herself into the research, Alexander soon discovered more Black men were incarcerated in the early 2000s than had been enslaved in 1850 America.
She was even more haunted to learn of the difference in treatment of Black Americans versus white Americans during the nation’s War on Drugs—white teenagers were often given a second chance and offered treatment when arrested for being in the possession of crack cocaine.
The same was not true for Black Americans, who, when charged with the same crimes were often slapped with mandatory minimum sentences, resulting in the establishment of a criminal record and damaging their professional chances in the future.
Bringing awareness
A talented writer, Alexander decided attention needed to be brought to the discrepancy and at first wrote a paper breaking down the numbers and holding up a mirror to a country who was not ready to face the uncomfortable truth of how law enforcement is affected by racism.
Her paper was rejected by 15 scholarly journals.
Alexander was told the information was too uncomfortable, too controversial—not that her paper was inaccurate or that she was mistaken in how she presented the facts. Her paper rejected, and seeing the same injustice playing out in courtrooms across the country that she witnessed as a child riding in the car with her father, Alexander went on to pen one of the bestselling and most controversial novels of our time, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Published in 2010, Alexander’s novel presented cold, hard facts calmly—describing a two-tier justice system that would put Jim Crowe laws to shame.
She discussed how legal discrimination opens the door for the stripping away of fundamental citizenship rights. She pointed out how just one felony conviction can lead to the removal of voting rights, ability to obtain public housing assistance, limits employment opportunities and fields of occupation, while also restricting one’s access to educational resources.
Alexander defiantly claimed the nation never lost its racist caste system; it simply redefined it. According to Alexander the nation’s dirty secret, its most uncomfortable truth, was not that the system was broken, it was that it was working exactly as it had been designed.
Legacy
Following her tenure at ACLU, Alexander worked as a Stanford Law professor and is now a Union Theological Seminary visiting professor and New York Times opinion columnist. Her book has since been read and debated in countless universities, law schools and social justice organizations across America.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness has also won several awards, including the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.
Alexander has built a legacy of standing in the gap between justice and injustice while shining a necessary reflective light. Without her silent witness as a child, and her bold bravery as an adult, would attention or change have ever come?