#relg 102 Medium Post 3

I had not engaged with any of the materials before this week, but I was familiar with stereotypes of black girls in the media and I had seen or heard of some of the incidences displayed in the documentary. I was also aware of the effects of mass incarceration and the Drug War on African-American communities in America, but Michelle Alexander’s comparison to Jim Crow was eye-opening and disturbing. Before reading this, I believed that mass incarceration in this country was a problem because of underlying racial biases: I knew mass incarceration affects black people more than it does any other race. However, I didn’t understand that it was a system put in place specifically to batter black people down, or as Alexander puts it, to take on the mantle of “the New Jim Crow.”

I found that the stereotypes of black people, and particularly black males, as animalistic and inhuman apply to both the problem of mass incarceration as Alexander described it and the Drug War of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. America feels that black men are dangerous, like wild animals, and therefore must lock them up and push them out of society. In a racial bias test I once took, I was asked whether I crossed the street when I saw a black man; I said no, but the question was on that test for a reason. Why? Because the idea that black men are dangerous has been inbred to our society. It goes to show that this stereotype, created to keep black people down, reaches from the highest echelons of black society (Lebron on the Vogue cover) to the lowest. However, this stereotype also manifests itself in a very different way, as demonstrated in the crack epidemic and drug war: black people are portrayed as helpless (“‘the crack whores’” and “‘crack babies’”) and in need of a government that will step in and take care of them. In reality, of course, the government only hurt African-Americans.