Michelle Alexander

 
 
Michelle Alexander, a law associate professor at Ohio State University, writer and civil rights advocate is also a New York Times best-selling author of New Jim Crow: The Mass Incarceration in Age of Colorblindness. The book, originally released in 2010, was re-released at the start of 2012 and received significant national acclaim in the shape of thirty-five weeks New York Times’ best-seller list while topping the best-seller list of Washington Post. Her work has since become a source of scholarly criticism and debate. The book is also considered to be one the of the best African American books of 2010, for which it won the prestigious NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Non-Fiction Works. Michelle Alexander tickets are becoming exceedingly popular among aspiring civil right activists and law-interested intellectuals.
 
Michelle Alexander graduated from Vanderbilt University and Stanford Law School. She served many years at Northern California’s ACLU as director of Racial Justice Project. Alexander was responsible for directing Stanford Law School’s Civil Rights Clinic and was also Justice Harry Blackmun’s law clerk at U.S. Supreme Court. She also worked as Chief Judge Abner Mikva’s law clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit.  Alexander was appointed as the associate at Demchak & Baller, Goldstein and Saperstien, specializing in class action suits for plaintiff-side, alleging gender and race discrimination. She now holds the joint appointment at Mortiz College of Law in Ohio State and Kirwan Institute of the Study of Race. She has litigated countless cases of class action discrimination and alongside worked on issues regarding criminal justice reform. In 2005, Alexander received the Soros Justice Fellowship of Open Society Institute.  
 
In New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander asserts that mass incarceration, which has resulted from ‘War on Drugs’ has proved to be a manifestation of racial caste system, presumed to have come to an end with Jim Crow era. Alexander supports her argument with the fact that rates of black poverty in some cases have gotten worse since Martin Luther King’s death.  Her most convincing point is that drug use has actually gone up in the white middle class societies that are quite distant from bring the targets of ‘War on Drugs’. She has argued that mass incarceration in America operates as racial control system in a way similar to the way it operated under Jim Crow. Her work has drawn attention to racial disparities existent in the criminal justice system. She notes that race has an important function in defining roles within the current system, but this is not so because of what has often been understood to be hostile bigotry. Such system of control is dependent on racial indifferences instead of racial hostility. The latter is a feature of its predecessors.
 
In 2012, Michelle Alexander spoke about the origin-story of her book, which resulted in the aftermath of her profiling an African-American man who had been subjected to repeated stops by the police with names and dates. While listening to his account, she strongly felt that she had the model case that she had been long looking. The man also told her that he had a conviction of drug-felony on his record so that Alexander had to completely back-track. She finally found out that the conviction was a mere insurmountable obstacle for a test case for her before a jury at that time. As a result the man reacted angrily towards her, asserting that he was in fact innocent and that he was just put to a belittling plea bargain. He called her ‘no better than police’. He added comments that stuck with Alexander, eventually growing and prompting her observation of occurrences in Oakland, which then came into the book. The writer has looked for the man, partly to dedicate her book to him. In her talks, she speaks passionately about civil rights while also welcoming questions from audience, so get hold of some cheap Michelle Alexander tickets in time.