Historical Conversation Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Historical Conversation Project - Essay Example These forms of discriminations are the one which were supposedly left behind and abolished by the Jim Crow rulings. These same things that were abolished are suddenly made legal once a person is branded as a criminal. Thus according to the words of Michelle Alexander the racial cast system in America has not ended but has been redesigned. The situation has come to a level that the criminal justice system in America functions in a way as a racial and social control than as a system for crime prevention and control. Millions of children in the United States grow up believing that they too will one day go to jail. The young people are often targeted at young ages often before they are old enough to vote and then these children are stopped frisked searched and interrogated. When these children are arrested they are typically arrested for a relatively minor non violent offence. The offence they are acquitted for are mostly drug related offence. However the startling fact to note over here is that when the same crimes are committed by middle class children of white communities, it gets largely ignored. The blacks are arrested, swept in and are branded as criminals and felons and are ushered into a permanent second class status from which these people will never be able to escape. In the Jim Crow era poll taxes and literacy tests were used to keep the black people away from voting right. Today the same things are accomplished albeit in a much bigger proportions by a different set of laws.