Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander at Miller Center, 2011
Born	October 7, 1967
Nationality	American
Fields	Race in the United States criminal justice system, Racial profiling, Racism in the United States
Institutions	Ohio State University
Alma mater	Vanderbilt University Stanford Law School
Known for	The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander (born October 7, 1967^[1]) is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a writer.

Education and career

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. She served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. Alexander directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination.^[2]

Alexander now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.^[2]

Alexander has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute.^[3]

Book: The New Jim Crow

Alexander published the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). In it, she argues that systemic racial discrimination in the United States has resumed following the Civil Rights Movement's gains; the resumption is embedded in the US War on Drugs and other governmental policies and is having devastating social consequences. She considers the scope and impact of this current law enforcement, legal and penal activity to be comparable with that of the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book concentrates on the mass incarceration of African-American men.^[4]

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander argues that mass incarceration in America functions as a system of racial control in a similar way to how Jim Crow once operated. Alexander’s work draws attention to the racial disparity that exists in the criminal justice system. Alexander notes, “Race plays a major role-indeed, a defining role – in the current system, but not because of what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility – a feature it actually shares with its predecessors.”^[5]

In a 2012 interview, Alexander told the story of the origin of the book. Working on "Driving While Black" DWB racial profiling in Oakland with the ACLU, a young African-American man came in with a well-documented case of most of a year of repeated stops by police with dates and names. Listening to his story, Alexander increasingly felt she had the test case for which she was looking. Then the man said in passing he had a drug-felony conviction on his record and Alexander had to backtrack completely and finally: The conviction was an insurmountable obstacle to a test case in front of a jury for her at that time. In turn, the man then built a strong anger toward her, saying in effect "I'm innocent ...; it was just a plea bargain"; and that she "was no better than the police" and "You're crazy if you think you're going to find anyone here to challenge the police who is not already 'in the system'?"; he ended by stalking out, tearing up his notes as he went. The experience stuck with Alexander and eventually grew, prompted in part by more observations of events in Oakland, into the book. She has tried to find the young man again, in part to dedicate the book to him, but has so far been unable to.^[6]

The New Jim Crow was re-released in paperback in early 2012 and has received national acclaim. As of September 30, 2012 it has been on the The New York Times Best Seller list for 35 weeks^[7] and it also reached #1 on the Washington Post best seller list in 2012. The book has also been the subject of scholarly debate and criticism.^{[8][9][10][11]}

Personal

Alexander is a daughter of Sandra Alexander, formerly of Ashland, Oregon, and the late John Alexander, originally from Evanston, Illinois. Her mother was the senior vice president of the ComNet Marketing Group in Medford, Oregon, which solicits donations for nonprofit organizations. Her younger sister, Leslie Alexander, is a professor of African American Studies at The Ohio State University and is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861. Michelle Alexander married Carter Mitchell Stewart in 2002, then a senior associate at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, a San Francisco law firm.^[1]

Currently, Stewart serves as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.^[12] He does not share Michelle Alexander's views about the criminal justice system.^[13]

References

External links

• Tomgram: Michelle Alexander