The New Jim Crow- Chapter 6: Black Lives Matter, Trump and the Future- write 5 paragraphs.
The last chapter of the book includes calls for systemic reform. These calls have been taken up by the Black Lives Matter movement, which formed a few years after the publishing of The New Jim Crow. Additionally, while Michelle Alexander worried about racial justice complacency under Obama, the situation has been extremely different under Donald Trump. Racial tensions exploded in the spring and summer of 2020, but they had been well beyond a simmer for a long time. The rhetoric of the President certainly played a role (he is after all the most powerful person in the world). Now Joe Biden is President but little seems to have changed in terms of race relations.
In light of recent events and drawing on your knowledge gained from reading the book, What needs to change in our country? What reforms need to be made? How can racial tensions be tamped down? And what do we make of the working-class-and-poor whites who Alexander mentions numerous times as people who were purposely divided from Black people of their social class in a political “divide and conquer” strategy? Obviously, many poor and working-class white males and females (as Alexander emphasizes in chapter 6) are hurting too. They have lost a great deal due to globalization. At the same time, many have turned to white nationalism, neo-Nazism, white supremacy, anti-immigrant ideologies and all manner of conspiracy theories to explain their place in the world and to fight to regain their advantage. How can we move forward when the races are in such stark opposition, when both see themselves (rightly or wrongly) as victims and when politicians and elites (just like under Jim Crow) seek to exploit and manipulate these divisions and these feelings of victimization?
