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yatimaA devastating masterpiece. When Trump was elected, I was afraid that my lifelong nightmares of concentration camps would come true. I should have known that they already had. Since the inception of Reagan's War on Drugs, the USA has been a for-profit carceral state.
I had known bits and pieces of this - one can hardly live in America without knowing it. Alexander's achievement is to put together the evidence in as damning an indictment as one can imagine. The fact that this was written two years into the first Obama administration, and seven years before the inauguration of a white supremacist demagogue, just underscores the seriousness and urgency of its message. Black lives matter.
Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
I had known bits and pieces of this - one can hardly live in America without knowing it. Alexander's achievement is to put together the evidence in as damning an indictment as one can imagine. The fact that this was written two years into the first Obama administration, and seven years before the inauguration of a white supremacist demagogue, just underscores the seriousness and urgency of its message. Black lives matter.
