New Jim Crow, The: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The 2012-2013 UUA Common Read. Ordinarily $19.95, we are offering a 10% discount on single copies of the New Jim Crow (now $17.95) and as always, there will be a 20% discount on copies of 10 or more. Be sure to enter the discount code JIMCROW12 in the discount field when you check out.

The New Jim Crow was initially published with a modest first printing and reasonable expectations for a hard-hitting book on a tough topic. Now, ten-plus printings later, the long-awaited paperback version of the book Lani Guinier calls “brave and bold,” and Pulitzer Prize–winner David Levering Lewis calls “stunning,” will at last be available.

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted 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.

Featured on The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy Now, and C-Span’s Washington Journal, The New Jim Crow has become an overnight phenomenon, sparking a much-needed conversation—including a recent mention by Cornel West on Real Time with Bill Maher—about ways in which our system of mass incarceration has come to resemble systems of racial control from a different era.

The Unitarian Universalist discussion guide to The New Jim Crow helps groups reflect on the book and consider together what steps they are called to take, as people of faith, in response to Alexander’s call for awareness and action.