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Alexander calls for social movement

National best-seller Michelle Alexander spoke to a crowd of more than 500 people Thursday night. The lecture was followed by a panel of civil rights experts and the opportunity for audience questions. Photo by Maggie Cipriano.
National best-seller Michelle Alexander spoke to a crowd of more than 500 people Thursday night. The lecture was followed by a panel of civil rights experts and the opportunity for audience questions. Photo by Maggie Cipriano.

“My son wants an answer,” civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times Nov. 26. “He is a black boy…silently begging me to say, ‘No, sweetheart, you have no need to worry’…[but] I am stammering.”

A crowd of nearly 600 people welcomed Alexander to the Hilltop Thursday night to listen to her lecture titled “Colorblind Racism in the American Judicial System.”

Alexander said she heard the stories, theories and comparisons that people made for years between today’s justice system and the Jim Crow years, which were characterized by laws that enforced segregation after the Civil War.

“There was a time when I thought people who made [comparison claims] were doing more harm than good in an effort to try to achieve racial equality,” she said, stressing the comparisons were too extreme. “But what a difference a decade makes in working as a civil rights lawyer…I had a series of experiences of what I call my awakening.”

Although she had her “awakening” more than 10 years ago, Alexander said the United States seems to have had theirs just last year on Aug. 9.

“A time comes when the truth looks you in the face, daring you to say nothing, and you know you mustn’t avert your gaze,” she said. “I think that moment came [for the U.S.] when Michael Brown was gunned down.”

Alexander described a transition from the years of Jim Crow to those of drug wars, detailing how during Jim Crow, many black men would be randomly searched or lynched for the simplest of crimes, such as stealing 75 cents. Today, she said the same thing is happening when white police officers randomly frisk and search black men on the street simply because they have saggy pants or are passing time on a sidewalk corner.

Instead of helping build communities, the U.S. has stunted community growth by declaring a drug war on impoverished areas of the country, according to Alexander.

“Just a short time after Martin Luther King, Jr., we have become the most punitive nation in the world, and the roots of our punitiveness have a great deal to do with race,” she said. “Segregationists found they could no longer chant ‘segregation forever,’ so they began to chant ‘law and order.’”

Alexander cited figures such as one black man being killed by a white police officer every three to four days and quoting pieces from Isabel Wilkerson stating that police killings of black men today are nearly equal to lynchings from the times of Jim Crow, garnering reactions of shock and disbelief from the crowd.

Despite the statistics, however, there may be an answer to solving the issues of today.

“The reason some communities are war zones and others are not is not because of the numbers of guns that can be found there,” Alexander said. “What makes a neighborhood safe is the number of good schools, good jobs [and] good opportunities to improve one’s life.”

She said where there are high levels of joblessness, there will likely be violence; therefore, Alexander proposed a three-part plan.

“First, we have got to be willing to tell the truth…to admit out loud that we as a nation have done it again and created a caste system in this country,” she said. “It’s going to take an enormous amount of consciousness raising, discussion and dialogue.”

The second part of the plan is to build a new underground railroad.

“Today, we have to be willing to work for the abolition of this system of mass incarceration,” Alexander said. “That means ending the drug war for once and for all. It’s time to shift to a public health model that stops criminalizing people and starts helping.”

Finally, Alexander said it’s going to take more than just hopes and wishes to change the mentality of society; it requires action.

“[This problem] rests on one core belief: that some of us are not worthy of genuine care, compassion and concern, and some lives just don’t matter,” she said. “When we challenge that belief, the system will begin to collapse. The only path that has any hope of getting us to the promised land is movement building.”

Alexander closed the evening with a reality check for the audience, which prompted a standing ovation.

“Think about it: we’ve all committed a crime at some point,” she said. “If you’ve gone 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, you put people in more harm than others who are smoking a joint in the privacy of their own living room.”

Audience members left the event engaged in discussions of what they can do next to spur the change in their own communities.

“I feel like she said what we’ve all been thinking and wanting to say this entire time,” senior television arts major Ivoree Larkin said. “What’s going on now in our African American community is that it is the new, modern-day Jim Crow. It’s become scary outside to do regular activities…Even Chicago, my own neighborhood, has become a dangerous territory to even reside in.”

Many community members were in attendance, and some said a revolution is needed.

“I don’t really think a revolution is going to happen at Bradley, but I do think what she was saying about it coming from the grassroots is important,” Peoria resident Tonya Sneed said. “It’s not going to come from legislation, it’s not going to come from the powers that be that have so much at stake with this. It has to come from young people, from students.”

Bradley student leaders said they felt this presentation was needed on campus.

“[Alexander] actually talked about what black men and community members face on a daily basis,” Alpha Phi Alpha President Rasheed Habler said. “Being a black individual, it reached out to me because a lot of people don’t understand the amount that we face…I’ve been in a lot of cases where I was approached differently by police than if I would have been if I was a Caucasian male.”

Habler said he hopes it was not only Bradley and Peoria community members that took something away from the presentation but also Bradley’s police officers.

“[In Bradley Safety Alerts], if [the offender] was black, we would mention that he is a black figure,” he said. “However, if he wasn’t black, it would have just mentioned a male was found, and it never would have mentioned he was Caucasian. So, I hope this [lecture] didn’t just target Bradley students but that the police officers also gained knowledge from this presentation.”

Alexander graduated from Stanford Law School and went on to work for the ACLU of Northern California as director of the Racial Justice Project. She also directed Civil Rights Law clinics at Stanford School of Law, launched the “Driving While Black or Brown Campaign” and eventually wrote “The New Jim Crow,” which won the NAACP Image Award in 2011 for best nonfiction and became a national best-seller.

Alexander now works as an Ohio State University associate professor and a civil rights attorney, as well as a mother of three children whom she said in an interview are her “most challenging and rewarding job of all.”

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