Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness takes the reader back in time to the years of the Jim Crow Era and proceeds to the years of the present. She analyzes many different studies and statistics in order to prove her point. Her point is how America hasn't ended the racial caste system, America just redesigned it. By targeting black men through the war on drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control." (Alexander, Summary) Even though America establishes the principle of colorblindness, the system is relegating millions to a second class status. A Foreword written by Cornell West describes the book in short as "a genuine resurrection of the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. amid the confusion of the age of Obama." (Alexander, Foreword) "This book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness." (Alexander, The New Jim Crow)
             The author Michelle Alexander is a female African American civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. There are many roles she fills in life being a mother of three young children, "an associate professor at Stanford University, she holds a joint appointment at Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University serving as an associate professor of law currently. She also serves as a director of The Racial Justice Project for ACLU of Northern California. She dedicates a lot of her time to free-lance writing, public speaking, supporting groups and organizations engaged in movement-building to end mass incarceration. Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbuilt University. She clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the D.C Circuit of the U.S Court of Appeals a...