They�re the defeated. You�ll notice you don�t see them in such large numbers rising anymore. So few are on the stage these days, and most are not sure if they�re coming or going. And strange things happen as a result. One bites an ear of his opponent while another, professing to be mainly Asian, appears as a Black with a Black father. A military general agrees that imaginary targets are there, and others agree that racism is a thing of the past. And then there are so many others, drifting way beyond the backstage.

Before an awareness of the war, before troops could be assembled, they lost. Alone and shamed, disenfranchised, again, how else are they to feel but unwanted, the scourge of society.

No, I�m not talking about the Wall Street bankers who absconded with crimes against humanity, nor am I talking about warmongers, military rouges, double-talking politicians, corporate scoundrels.

In a world were justice ruled this minority would be the defeated.

In this war, genocide is the desired goal. The victims are people for whom the War on Drugs has left them utterly invisible to justice and subject to annihilation.

It didn�t used to be this way. Think back some years, if you dare. There on the world stage appeared an amazing people, emerging survivors of four hundred years of enslavement in the U.S., saying look at us, America! The world was stunned, but they looked. Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Paul Robson, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Miles Davis, Jackie Roberson, Mohammed Ali, James Brown. Many more named and unnamed appeared where they were not before in the science labs, in the halls of academia, in the governmental power.

Look, America! Look at America!

But, America didn�t want to look anymore. It had seen enough even before the clinched fists and the naturals, even before Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It had seen and heard enough from Black people.

You�re not America!

On August 3, 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the U.S. government officially declared war against Black people residing in its borders. Long live the southern strategy! Sniper shots and dynamite blasts had efficiently terrorized these people into abject numbness. A pogrom could do the trick! Troops, weaponry, ammunition! Call it the War on Drugs. And the beauty of the pogrom - the American public wouldn�t notice the war underway right on its homeland!

Long live the southern strategy!

Long live white supremacy!

How could a government wage a war to practice genocide against Black people after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights bill - after everyone recognized the hatred of a Bull Connors and a KKK pogrom? How could a government conciliatory to Civil Rights leaders be accused of engaging war against the same people for which the government agreed to protect against discrimination? If you are one to ask either or both questions, if you seem puzzled that white supremacy lies beneath the surface of the post racial era we now live in - then The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness will only anger you.

If you are inclined to believe that Black people have been given enough and here�s another book complaining and excusing an inferior, violent people or in PC language, a people too disadvantaged to be helped because they are just too far down the ladder. You may turn away! Reading this book requires the strong not the stoic or the stubborn.

There are no charts or graphics and no academic jargon or legalese to distract the reader from the author�s narrative, a narrative that requires witnesses to a collective complicity in violence for which few, infants and children, may plead innocent.

Michelle Alexander�s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (published by The New Press) is about the invisible people and the invisible birdcage that keeps Blackness locked in and alienated from society. The masses of incarcerated Blacks stand in for all these people and the criminal justice system represents the sacrificial space wherein Blackness is disappeared from sight. What is allowed to represent Blackness is the constant parade of exaggeration: crack babies and welfare mothers and of defeated: gansta rapper and young men in baggy pants. But then there�s the exceptional: the Oprah and the Michael Jordan and the Barrack Obama. Thank God, some would say, for these individuals or these people would be complete failures, losers.

But, wait, Alexander says. This isn�t a true picture of reality in the U.S. So much of the action takes place not only behind the scenes but also long ago, steps were taken to assure the images of Blackness would appear the way we see them today. The sacrifice doesn�t take place where we can witness it. Most important, this sacrifice of Blackness is part of a continual practice begun in slavery, carried through during the Jim Crow Era and resurging again, in the 80s, with a series of laws and attitudes towards Blacks in what Michelle Alexander calls the NEW Jim Crow.

History isn�t irrelevant in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. History here is tangible. Sacrifices and omissions once revealed reflect the truths we can�t deny:

Since the nation�s founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.

Slavery ended, but �the idea of race lived on.� Citing historian C. Vann Woodward�s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Alexander recalls the reality of the South after the Civil War. The South�s political, economical, and social system was in shambles. At the state level, there was �temporary anarchy� and the state of mind bordered on �hysteria.� Poor whites, while possessing �his or her white skin - a badge of superiority,� nonetheless felt betrayed.

In slavery, strict separation of the races was impossible and unnecessary. The status of slave didn�t apply to whites. But now, with the social structures destroyed and with the need to re-establish the Southern economy, whites looked for ways to re-subjugate the Black. Any good pogrom begins with propaganda: narratives featured images of angry Black men, aggressive Black men, Black uprisings against whites, particularly white women! Phantoms haunted whites, but real live humans hunted down Blacks.

A system of peonage included the Black codes meant to re-establish control over Blacks while also providing free or cheap labor, sought to reign in the freedom of predominantly Black men, family men - fathers and husbands. �Nine southern states adopted vagrancy laws - which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks,� writes Alexander. When the Black codes were outlawed, �a slew of federal civil rights legislation protecting the newly freed slaves was passed during the relatively brief but extraordinary period of black advancement known as the Reconstruction Era.� Masses of Black began to vote. Near the end of reconstruction, writes Alexander, fifteen percent of all Southern elected officials were Black. The Freedmen�s Bureau provided basic necessities. Schools opened up allowing Blacks to learn to read and write. �Literacy climbed.� The Black community was looking forward.

Black advancement, however, didn�t sit well with most Southerners. The language of the Fifteenth Amendment left loopholes for those looking for loopholes. Absent from the Fifteenth Amendment, explains Alexander, was language prohibiting the states from imposing educational, residential, or other qualifications for voting.� Absent too was any recourse for poor freed Blacks. It�s too early for the NAACP.

�The backlash against gains of African Americans in the reconstruction Era was swift and severe,� Alexander writes. The North already established racial segregation to �prevent race-mixing� and to preserve �racial hierarchy following the abolition of Northern slavery.� Now in the South, conservative whites began �a terrorist campaign against Reconstruction governments and local leaders� to ��redeem�� the South.

The U.S. government withdrew federal troops from the South, the budget for the Freedmen�s Bureau was cut so severely as to make the agency �virtually defunct,� and the U.S. government made no effort to �enforce federal civil rights legislation.� So here are the freed Blacks left unprotected in a hostile environment. For Southerners, the drawback of the federal government meant freedom! They turned to the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come,� Alexander explains. Vagrancy laws subjected Blacks to criminal charges, debt, and death. A gesture could be interpreted as an �insulting gesture�, a crime! It�s no coincidence that �slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime� after �Emancipation.�

Southern whites, Alexander shows, �concluded that it was in their political and economic interests to scapegoat blacks.� Jim Crow would be a return to ��sanity,�� a return to a racial caste system that came to represent the ��natural�� order of the New South. But, as Alexander reminds the reader, this caste system is not limited to the South. Northern liberals and Populists had already turned a blind eye to Black people, and the South interpreted this silence as ��permission to hate.��

The racial caste system flourished for many years in the U.S. while many whites turned a blind eye to it and to the suffering of Blacks. Just as Jefferson worked on his narrative about freedom while drafting the U.S. Constitution, Americans worked on the narrative of the American Dream, complete with a Black maid in the kitchen and a gardener in the garden. Sacrificial narratives indeed but so American!

Black fought back in increments until small movements became a massive movement of Blacks and whites. Black leaders, including Dr. King, drew national and international attention to the criminal caste laws and the hypocrisy inherent in Americans� understanding of democracy. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed. Many believed that Jim Crow died. Our educational system and the corporate media usually concludes the narrative here - with Dr. King standing in front of the Lincoln Monument before a huge crowd speaking to the world about a vision, a dream of whites and Blacks sitting together in colorblind America where a person is not judged by the color of his or her skin but by his or her character.

The New Jim Crow rightly claims that the caste system didn�t end there. In fact, Jim Crow continued in another form following the backlash to the Civil Rights gains. To many Americans the Civil Rights gains represented another sacrificial crisis that needed to be resolved - the American Way! Alexander recalls another omission from the narrative: a King who spoke in the last three years of his life about economic inequality that led to poverty not only for Blacks but for poor whites as well. King called for a Poor People�s Movement to eradicate poverty in the U.S. He called for a shift from a civil rights movement to a human rights movement.

America�s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.

But we know what happened and what didn�t happen.

King is assassinated and once again Americans turned their eyes away from the poor, the Black. Conservatives didn�t. They created another narrative, very much incorporating elements of previous narratives, very much scapegoating Blacks and very much allowing the nation the permission to hate. The new racial order would, Alexander writes, �conform to the needs and constraints of the time�it would have to be formally race-neutral - it could not invoke explicit or clearly intentional race discrimination.� It would appeal to �racist sentiments� and accompany a political movement that would succeed �in putting vast majority of blacks back in their place.�

Americans were asked to turn back and look at Black Americans - at least temporarily. Ignore the TV images of hippies, flower children, Woodstock, the Weathermen and even the testimonies of Watergate-related officials and the pictures of the dead in Viet Nam. Look at the criminal right in your neighborhoods, at your place of employment. The new racial caste system, Alexander explains, didn�t violate the law or limit �acceptable political discourse.� But the effects were the same as ��segregation forever.��

First mobilized in the 1950s as a response to Civil Rights efforts of Blacks in the South, law and order became Southern conservatives� battle cry: �King�s philosophy of civil disobedience was the cause of crime.� Civil Rights, Alexander points out, not enforced economic inequities, threatened the social order! Enter the Southern Strategy. Let�s galvanize fear and hate! After all, the problem was culture, not race and class, but Black culture (Alexander). Led by conservative Republicans, white Southerners, half of all Catholics, blue collar workers, and ex-democrats, the movement formed the �new majority� that swept Richard Nixon into office. H.R. Haldeman,� writes Alexander, recalled Nixon declaring that the ��whole problem is really the blacks�� (qtd. in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).

Law and Order!

Violence is Black! Economic inequality is Black! �Special black programs� gave working-class white money to Blacks who �did not deserve them.� Illegal drugs were �public enemy number one.� Illegal drug users: Black. While Civil Rights leaders focused their attention on affirmative action laws and busing, white conservatives were displaying images of the criminal as Black. (The New Jim Crow doesn�t include a discussion on COINTELPRO, and the assassination and incarceration of the Black community�s leadership. But we have to recall the effort to destroy any voice that spoke up and denounced the system�s attack on the Black community).

Then Ronald Reagan!

As The New Jim Crow argues, �Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals.� In 1982, the Reagan administration declared an official War on Drugs when crime was at its lowest level, and before crack cocaine was introduced into the Black community. War is declared against the Black community - Black drug users and Black drug dealers - not the majority white drug users or dealers. But this reality must be omitted! Go to the Black communities and hunt them down! Neutralize them - Blacks - for good!

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed �minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for the distribution of crack - associated with blacks - than powder cocaine, associated with whites.� In 1988, Alexander continues, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act �authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense.�

That was Reagan�s War on Drugs, as Alexander writes, �cloaked in race-neutral language� and offering �whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.� The propagandists on Senior Bush�s staff, if we recall, crafted Willie Horton ads to terrorize the American public with an image of Black violence. I am reminded of the current great orator of law and order who oscillates between his admiration for Reagan and Bill Clinton (Ricky Ray Rector, Welfare Reform, and �One-Strike and You�re Out�). The federal government now funds police departments to engage in the War of Drugs, targeting Black communities and profiling potential victims for arrest. Blacks discovered that �follow the rules� doesn�t apply. It didn�t apply to Sean Bell or Oscar Grant or many countless Blacks, men and women, old and young. Yet, Barrack Obama, himself, as Alexander reminds us, a past user of illegal drugs, lecturers Black communities about responsibility and points to the image of absentee Black fathers but he and the media, writes Alexander, never ask �where the missing fathers might be found.�

Actively omit the sacrifice from the discourse and you have colorblind society!

There are more Blacks under correctional control today than there were Blacks enslaved in 1850. More are disenfranchised today, Alexander points out, than in 1870.� Labeled felons for the same drug violations committed by whites on college campuses, in urban and rural communities throughout the U.S., the Black convicts are excluded from public housing, employment, education, voting - for life! Go away and die! As Alexander explains:

Once again, in response to a major disruption in the prevailing racial order - this time the civil rights gains of the 1960s - a new system of racialized social control was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.

Keep in mind that the author is talking about non-violent offenders! We have yet to have a narrative that explains how the Black community was able to secure drugs from foreign lands.

In addition to tracing the historical parallels of the current era of Jim Crow with the earlier era, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness points to the way the Supreme Court rulings preventing convicted felons from voting in many states or from even filing discrimination claims against the police or state. In some states, the felons are forced to pay back the cost of their incarceration!

Blacks are warehoused in out-of-the-way, rural areas where whites make up the majority of employed law enforcement personnel and where white towns benefit in terms of tax dollars and services. In the meantime, �today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.� White crime doesn�t exist; �white crime lacks social meaning.� The New Jim Crow re-establishes a caste system that makes race - Black people - invisible. We must admit out loud, Alexander writes, that �it was because of race that we didn�t care much what happened to �those people� and imagined the worst possible things about them.� The prison industrial complex hasn�t failed in its goal, she tells us. On the contrary, it has succeeded in marginalizing Blacks and disrupting thousands of families and their communities. It has also allowed the American public to continually sacrifice the idea of democracy.

The battle for democracy can�t be won exclusively in the courtrooms, Alexander argues. While the NAACP has historically engaged in protesting Affirmative Action through the courts, it has also created a class of professional legal people whose focus is strictly on litigation - courtroom battles. As a result, Alexander explains, public attention over the years has shifted from the streets to the courtroom. Rather than eliminate the practice of sacrifice/omission, we�ve engaged it! As Alexander states, the �extraordinary grassroots movement that made civil rights legislation possible faded from public view.�

Litigation work, often focusing on affirmative action cases, omits the voice and the engagement of those without legal expertise. Alexander asks that we consider this: is it possible to see affirmative action, racial �cosmetic� diversity initiatives as - diversions from the frontline battle, that is, the creation of a caste of people through the criminal justice system?

The question posed here is whether affirmative action has functioned similarly, offering relatively meager material advantages but significant psychological benefits to people of color, in exchange for the abandonment of a more radical movement that promised to alter the nation�s economic and social structure�

Affirmative action, particularly when it is justified on the grounds of diversity rather than equality (or remedy), masks the severity of racial inequality in America, leading to greatly exaggerated claims of racial progress and overly optimistic assessments of the future for African Americans.

The �abandonment of a more radical movement� opened the space for fear and hatred to mask itself in the rhetoric of diversity, adopted by moderate and liberal whites and elite Blacks. But however comforting to some, a sprinkling of Blacks here and there doesn�t make for a democracy.

The new caste system, Alexander argues, depends on this rhetoric of diversity and the �black exceptionalism.� Look at Oprah! Look at Michael Jordan! The exceptional must walk a tightrope, for we have not been free but fall under social controls that regulate what we do and say, how we do and say anything, and scrutinize our very appearance, attire - purpose for being among white society. For the �exceptional� Black who falls from grace - the good company of predominantly white institutions - and for all other Blacks who are not successful or who don�t have boots - well, it�s �their own fault.� The �exceptional� Black in the age of hate and fear (colorblindness) represents the absence democracy and the superficial presence of freedom.

Diversity spreads the myth of Black progress!

�Who is the us that civil rights advocates are fighting for?� Alexander asks. Certainly not those masses of incarcerated and those tens of millions caught in the correctional system and disenfranchised by and from society. What economic system benefits from this dysfunctional scheme of law and order? Certainly not us!

The sacrifice of Blackness is nothing more than the omission of freedom and democracy for all Americans. What reigns as law and order is hatred, indifference, fear.

End the War on Drugs, declares Alexander! Pick up where King left off and take up the radical movement that King believed �held revolutionary potential.� Alexander proposes that we �accept all of us or none� philosophy as we look to amend this egregious wrong by re-igniting a human rights movement in this country.

Alexander�s narrative does what the Left should have done all these many years: reflect on the truth of our past and challenge each attempt to turn our attention away from those truths. But reading The New Jim Crow opens the door on a well guarded truth: white supremacy has determined this nation�s response to the idea of democracy - and its genocide! Our ancestors and many of us have been sacrificial lambs but hopefully not in vain.

The New Jim Crow ends with a passage from James Baldwin�s Fire Next Time. The truth that Baldwin told his young nephew in 1962 we should tell our young people:

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.