JW AP Language Blog

Welcome to my final blog post! I have really enjoyed chronicling the thoughts and ideas that I had while reading the astoundingly powerful book The New Jim Crow , by Michelle Alexander. It has opened my eyes greatly to the horrific injustices of the legal system, and the racially-driven problem in the United States of mass incarceration. Throughout most of the book, Michelle Alexander focused on illustrating what exactly the problem is, and how it reached the extent that it is at today. In the last section, which I read this week, she switched gears from what the problem is, to how we can fix it. I think it was the perfect way to end the book, because as a reader, I had continuously been thinking about this question since the first chapter. I also think it was especially important because, as I talked about in some of my earlier posts, Alexander's main goal when writing this book seemed to be to inspire her readers to enact change. So my biggest takeaway from the book was essentia...

Welcome back to my blog! In this post I'll be talking about some of the connections I have noticed between historical racial inequality, and the modern-day problem of mass incarceration, plus some other relevant instances that show how far our country still has to go. In my most recent reading of The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, a point of focus was actually very specific similarities between the Jim Crow era and modern-day, which tied perfectly with my thoughts throughout this section. It is disheartening that so many modern-day connections and similarities came to mind without much thought, but it also gives light to the alarming reality that our country has a lot of problems regarding racism, especially in the legal system. Last week, a story surfaced on the news about an African-American woman in Texas who was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while on probation. The woman, Crystal Mason, had just recently been released from a former pris...