Michelle Alexander and Black Incarceration Rates: The Real Conspiracy

Black crime is Jim Crow's fault

Once you join the ranks of those who can see, no matter how badly you may desire averting your eyes from the truth you can never go back. Life would be so much simpler enjoying television, sports and movies without noticing the oddity of manufactured Black Fictional Heroes in every commercial, sitcom or film. They are needed to offset the lack of Black heroes in the real world, with the burden falling on basketball and football to fulfill the vast majority of those slots.

Once you join the ranks of those who can see, every news story takes on a whole new meaning. There are some people who search for answers by conjuring up elaborate conspiracies to explain the state of the world, believing a pernicious force is behind every action.

We at Stuff Black People Don't Like came up with the idea of Black Run America (BRA) to explain the most obvious conspiracy in the United States, an open conspiracy.  Academia and the media excuse away continuous Black failures, blaming someone called Jim Crow and something called white privilege as the primary source of these struggles.

It is because of academics like Michelle Alexander, who wrote the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, that mass murdering Black criminals like Brian Nichols can try and justify their actions as attempts to bring justice to unjust system. White privilege and this mysterious Jim Crow can be the only culprit behind the high prison rates of Black males:

More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. 

Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice  Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”

“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”

We wrote an article that detailed crime is dropping, though unemployment is rising. It is a commonly held belief that when times get tough, crime becomes more commonplace. Richard Cohen of The Washington Post pointed out what this means last year:

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation -- in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty -- my view at one time -- have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed. 

The figures are rather startling. From 2008 to 2009, violent crime was down 5.5 percent overall and almost 7 percent in big cities. Some of those cities are as linked with crime as gin is with tonic or as John McCain is with political opportunism. In Detroit, for instance, with the auto industry shedding workers, violent crime was down 2.4 percent. In Washington, D.C., murder was down 23.1 percent, rape 19.4 percent and property crime 6 percent. Stats for political corruption are not available. 

Probably the most surprising numbers come from Phoenix, which thought of itself as sinking in a sea of supposedly immoral and rapacious immigrants, all of them illegal and all waiting for nightfall and the chance for a nifty burglary or home invasion. If so, the crime reporting system has virtually collapsed. To the surprise no doubt of local TV news anchors, violent crime was down almost 17 percent. Back at 11.


What's going on? A number of things, say the experts. As is always the case, the police credited the police for magnificent police work, while others cited the decline in crack cocaine usage. Those answers, though, are only partially satisfying because, believe you me, if and when crime begins its almost inevitable ascent, the very same police authorities will blame economic or social conditions beyond their control -- not to mention the inevitable manpower shortage.


Whatever the reasons, it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

Censoring the truth of Black crime and overall Black dysfunction is the primary conspiracy that the media, academia and the government engage in and attempts to blame high rates of Black incarceration on anything except high rates of Black criminality threaten to exacerbate the problem.

That Michelle Alexander is offered a prominent opportunity to galvanize already irascible Black people is one of the primary causes behind people like Brian Nichols hatred of a "system" that keeps Blacks perpetually down and, ultimately, she is to be blamed for their actions.

Black people are offered every opportunity to succeed in America, because they have the advantage of Black privilege in BRA. Their anti-social actions are excused and blamed upon lingering white racism and this Jim Crow character that appears almost on cue whenever Black people face adversity.

The Washington Post ran a story on Black victims of Black crime, but failed to point out a large demographic of Black crime:

Utterly absent from the Post story and Justice Department stats is anything about white victims of crime. Not a word. Do white folks not count, though they are two-thirds of the population?

Yet, in "The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America," produced by the "right-leaning" New Century Foundation in 2005, using the same FBI and Justice surveys, startling facts emerge:

-- "Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks." Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

-- Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

-- "Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery." (If decent black folks have trouble hailing a cab, and they do, these numbers may help explain it.)

-- Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.

Even the two most famous sexual assaults by white men on black women in the last two decades -- the Tawana Brawley and Duke rape cases -- turned out to be hoaxes.

What do these statistics tell us? A message the Post will not report. The real repository of racism in America -- manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder -- is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.

Michelle Alexander peddles an insidious myth that militarizes an already bellicose Black population. They commit crimes without an academic, such as herself, excusing this criminality on a racist criminal justice system.

That her talk was attended by 200 Black people is a reason why the jury system in America is broken. Black people sitting on juries will always believe that the racist criminal justice system is on the prowl to lock up yet another innocent Black person and refuse to convict them. Respected Black people like Alexander told them so.

Just imagine how long her book would be if abortion wasn't legal.

We plan to go back to publishing more traditional SBPDL-style articles soon, but our next two articles will be the most explosive yet. Stay tuned.