Ryan Metzger - The Mass Incarceration of the Black Men of America - Rhetorical Analysis

 Ryan Metzger - 3/25/2021

The New Jim Crow - Rhetorical Analysis - 

Mass Incarceration, Then and Now (Remnick)

    Hi everyone, welcome back to my blog! In this blog I will be discussing mass incarceration of the Black Community, and more specifically, the Black men of America. Many of us at one point or another have heard of the stereotype that Black fathers are usually not with their kids, but why has this become a stereotype, and how?

    Alexander answers this question in depth with lots of facts and information as per usual, but also adds some questions of her own in order to give new light to the conversation. Alexander uses rhetorical questions throughout the entirety of the book in order to show a new viewpoint of a topic, or make the reader question what they may have previously believed to be true. Alexander's rhetorical questions work extremely well with here style of asking a question, providing evidence that answers the question, and then providing primary source stories of people who have been personally effected by policies like The War on Drugs. 

     Alexander's combination of writing strategies leads to a really interesting and revealing style of writing that exposes so many root problems with our modern day society, and how our justice system is implicitly racist.

    Throughout chapters four and five, Alexander has focused on a mix of topics, but in this blog I am going to focus purely on the mass incarceration of Black men. So why are there so many Black men missing? The answer is not simple, and even to this day does not really even have a full and complete explanation. 

    Like nearly all of the systemically racist policies of America, it all started back in The War on Drugs. As the U.S. started to systemically destroy the Black Community through the brutally racist policies meant to "destroy crack in America", they created extremely harsh and unfair sentencing legislation that made nearly anyone who possesed crack a felon. With being a felon comes the stripping of nearly all of your civil liberties, and unsuprisingly a lot of jail time for minor drug offenses. The extent to which these policies took Black men away from their communities is jaw dropping, and absolutely absurd.

"The total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male popluation and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area"(Alexander p.189). 

    To even imagine the fact that over half of Black men have been charged for felonies, and essentially had their lives destroyed for minor drug offences is blood boiling. Information like this is the reason why Alexander's book is so powerful and thought provoking. Nearly no other book has the type of insightful and in depth information that The New Jim Crow has. It is still hard for me to grasp the concept that over half of an entire community at one point or another has been arrested, thrown into jail, removed from their families, and had their civil liberties and opportunities stripped from them because of minor drug offences.

    Can you imagine the uproar that would have occured if anything close to the extent of this happened to a white community in America? Can you imagine if all of the Wall Street billionares were thrown in jail for using cocaine? I can't, becuase in America, we live in the land of white prosperity. If a white person gets in trouble for smoking weed, they usually get a fine, but if its a Black man, our justice system loves to throw him into a prison, and destroy his entire life. So you could only wonder why so many Black men are absent from their families, because throwing over half of them into jail will sure do the trick. At this point, the fact that people even wonder why there are so many Black men missing should really just not be a question. When you mass incarcerate an entire population of people, there doesn't even need to be a question of where they went, because we know where they went, and we know they are there for no good reason at all. 

     The stories of so many Black mens lives will never be told because our government does not want the Black community to succeed, and they have proved that time and time again. The even more infurating thing is that our country is still filled with so many ignorant people who don't even care, and will respond to this with blanket statements like "well maybe they should not have done drugs." Or that they "should have gone to college". This type of rhetoric is absolutely disgraceful when the offences these Black men commit are so minor, and almost never hurt anyone else. If our system was fair, Black men would attend college just as much as white men, and over 50 percent of black men in lower income areas would not be in prison. If they were given an equal chance at life, equal justice, and equal education, im sure that there would be just as many Black men in college as white men. But as we know that is not the case, because they are not given equal treatment and education, and if anything proves that, this does...

    "In Chicage (as in other cities across the United States), young black men are more likely to go to prison that to college. As of June 2001, there were nearly 20,000 more black men in the Illinois state prison system than enrolled in the state's public universities"(Alexander p.190). 

I'm going to leave the blog there, and I want you to just think about that, because there is no explanation needed for that, because no words can describe how disgusting that truly is.

 

 Thank you for reading,

 Comment what you think, and I hope that my blog has intrigued you and made you deeply think  about systemic racism, and the problems plaguing our nation, Ryan