The Progressive Forum: Michelle Alexander

Title: The Progressive Forum: Michelle Alexander
Location: Wortham Center, Cullen Theater
Link out: Click here
Description: Michelle Alexander
Civil Rights Lawyer, Legal Scholar, Advocate

Author: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess

Tuesday, October 2 at 7:30
Wortham Center, Cullen Theater

The event is produced in association with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas.

Michelle Alexander asserts, “We have not ended the racial caste in America: we have merely redesigned it.” Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess, is a New York Times bestseller in which she examines how the mass incarceration of African American men, primarily through the war on drugs, has created a new racial under caste, a group of people defined largely by race that is subject to legalized discrimination, scorn, and social exclusion. She challenges the conventional wisdom that with the election of Barack Obama as President, our nation has “triumphed over race.” She says we should place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice. Alexander has served on the faculty of Stanford Law School and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. She has served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, and she has worked as a litigator at private law firms specializing in class action suites alleging race and gender discrimination. Currently, she is a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. She will greet fans and sign books at the end of the evening.
Start Time: 19:30
Date: 2012-10-02