Michelle Alexander

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Michelle Alexander at an event at the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs , 2011

Michelle Alexander (born October 7, 1967 in Stelle , Illinois ) is an American lawyer , civil rights activist and university professor. She primarily deals with racism in the US judicial system and everyday life. Her book The New Jim Crow , published in 2010, became a bestseller in the United States.

Life

Michelle Alexander is the daughter of John Alexander and Sandra Alexander, who headed the ComNet Marketing Group in Medford in the area of ​​donation marketing. Her younger sister, Leslie M. Alexander, is Professor of African American Studies at Ohio State University .

Michelle Alexander attended Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University . For several years she was the director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Racial Justice Project in Northern California, which led a nationwide campaign against governmental racial profiling . She led the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford University Law School and worked for the judge Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court and for Abner J. Mikva , chairman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. As an attorney at the Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller law firm, she specialized in advising plaintiffs in class actions for racial or gender discrimination.

Alexander is a lecturer at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University . She received the Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2005 . In 2016 she received a Heinz Award .

Her book The New Jim Crow , published in 2010, became a bestseller and sparked wide public debate.

Michelle Alexander married lawyer Carter Mitchell Stewart in 2002. Stewart later became a prosecutor and spoke out publicly against his wife's theses on the US judicial system.

The New Jim Crow

In her book The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness from 2010, she advocates the thesis that after the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the USA, systematic racial discrimination with devastating social consequences prevails again today, in particular through the " War on Drugs " and other measures taken by the police, judiciary, prison system and politics. Her book focuses on the mass imprisonment of African American men and male youths and the exclusion of ex-convicts from political and social life. She sees this treatment of African Americans as a system of racist rule and compares it to the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation in the 19th and 20th centuries. Alexander writes that race plays an important, if not the most important role in the current system, but not in the sense of the well-known hostile fanaticism. Rather, the system of rule is characterized by racial indifference (which she defines as a lack of compassion for groups of other races), a trait that the system shares with its predecessors, slavery and racial segregation. According to Alexander, minor reforms of the police and judicial system are no longer sufficient to overcome the new racism. Rather, a new civil rights movement against the "war on drugs" is required.

Fonts

  • The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness . The New Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-59558-643-8 .
    • The new Jim Crow. Mass incarceration and racism in the US . Translated from the English by Gabriele Gockel and Thomas Wollermann, Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-95614-128-7 .
  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (new edition for the tenth anniversary, with a new foreword), Ingram Publishers Services 2020, ISBN 978-1-62097-545-9

literature

  • Mark Karlin: "The USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world". Conversation with Michelle Alexander. On Racial Prejudice in the Criminal Justice and Prison System of the United States , in: Junge Welt , Weekend Supplement, August 25, 2012.
  • Rita Schwarzer: "We have been living in Trump's America for a long time". American civil rights activist Michelle Alexander denies that African Americans are equal in the United States. Interview with Michelle Alexander, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 17, 2017, online version (accessed February 19, 2017).

Web links

Commons : Michelle Alexander  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b "Weddings; Michelle Alexander, Carter Stewart" (limited no-charge access) , The New York Times , March 24, 2002. Retrieved January 16, 2012.
  2. ↑ a b Short biography ( memento of the original from April 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Ohio State University website @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / moritzlaw.osu.edu
  3. ^ "OSI Awards More Than $ 1.25 Million Nationwide to New Leaders in Criminal Justice Reform," Open Society foundations, January 31, 2005.
  4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mainjustice.com
  5. ↑ Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness . The New Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-59558-103-7 , p. X
  6. ↑ Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness . The New Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-59558-103-7 ; not published in German (as of 2013), translated as: The new Jim Crow. Mass incarceration in the age of color blindness
  7. ↑ cf. Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness . The New Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-59558-103-7 , p. 198. Note: The word “race” is used here in the sense of the American public discourse about “race”, in which the scientific The realization that there are no different human races in the sense of race theory has not yet found any conceptual expression.
personal data
SURNAME Alexander, Michelle
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer, civil rights activist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Place , Illinois