Racial Justice Book Club: The New Jim Crow

In partnership with Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, YWCA Northeast Kansas hosts a community book club that will feature books written by Indigenous people and people of color. All are invited to participate in monthly meetings to discuss the books and relevant social issues within our community. Discussions will be guided by YWCA's volunteer racial justice facilitators.

Our book club will meet online on Tuesdays in July 7th and 21st from 7:00 to 8:30 PM via the online web conferencing platform Zoom.

Receive updates about Racial Justice Book Club including the meeting details and bi-monthly Zoom link, by signing up here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=KSryIIYGFE-sP8W8WwfrvWQWkQvLzlZAtCBzQqAYtJdUNjA1STVHQ0NPR0pJOUNDWkc4R0c3OElOVi4u


July 7 & 21: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander
***We are working with our partners at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library to get free access to the e-book. Please check back for more details***

The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

As the United States celebrates its “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights—including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.


YWCA’s racial justice work is made possible in part by the generosity of Kansas Gas Service and their commitment to their core value of inclusion and diversity.