Michelle Alexander on Jim Crow, Storytelling and Professional Reflection

On this week's Smiley and West radio show (here), law prof Michelle Alexander (Ohio State) speaks about her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010).  I was struck by her frank reflections -- from the academy -- on her assessment of her litigation practice.  She said:

Well, it certainly - you know - my intent with this book, which is to - you know - shine a bright spotlight on the problem of mass incarceration in ghetto communities in particular, but I think it’s important, as you mentioned, for us to begin to tell the stories of people who are cycling in and out of prison and allow their voices to be heard, allow them to share their stories.   

You know, as a civil rights lawyer, I bear some blame for the fact that so few of those stories have been heard in our public discourse in recent years.  You know, when I was a lawyer at the ACLU litigating racial profiling cases, we would screen cases for felony convictions and for criminal records.  We wouldn’t represent anyone who had a criminal record out of fear that if we did, that law enforcement would just argue, “Well, of course it makes sense for the police to be targeting someone like him.”  We wanted to tell those stories of doctors and lawyers who are stopped and searched by the side of the road.  We wanted to tell the stories of military veterans, you know, coming home from the Iraq war, and fielding questions by the side of the road and having their car dismantled as drug-sniffing dogs circle the scene.  Those stories riveted the American public and - you know - there was an outpouring of  - you know - sympathy and compassion for victims of racial profiling because we selected so carefully the folks who got to tell their stories. 

And in retrospect now, I believe that strategy was wrong, that we were horribly mistaken in our failure to tell the stories of, you know, young black men who were stopped and searched, acquired criminal records and were hounded by the police - you know - week in and week out afterward, that - you know -  by refusing to allow the stories of people who are trapped within the system to be heard, it made it possible for the public to continue to imagine that they were unworthy of our moral concern.  And so I regret that, and I can think back to - you know - young men who came into my office telling me their stories of brutality by the police and profiling by the police, and I said to them, “I’m sorry, I can’t represent you, and I can’t allow your story to be heard.”  And I regret those days and I think those are precisely the stories that need to be told.

These comments remind me of the privilege we have as law professors to tell the "story" (of the law, of the justice system) as we see, detect, discover, measure, speculate.  Lawyers must tell the "story" of their client.  And cause lawyers have to tell the "story" of the clients who will "best" advance the cause.  Professor Alexander is refreshingly honest about how her perspective on racial profiling cases has changed.  The wise choice from a litigator's standpoint (i.e., telling the stories of lawyers, bankers, military veterans) now seems incomplete (i.e., failure to tell the stories of people "trapped within the system"). 

My pre-professorial life as a Tax/Trusts & Estates lawyer doesn't seem that long ago, even though I am in my eighth year of teaching.  Who I represented on what issues shaped the way I think about the tax system and lawyers' roles in that system.  Had I "grown up" professionally in a different law practice environment, I might come at the law differently.  I suppose that's part of what we do as academics -- we try to tease out whatever bias we might bring to study of law, hold it up to the light, turn it like a prism, look at the bias again, and try to assess whether the world looks any differently.  Michelle Alexander has my complete admiration for doing that explicitly.

Comments

[Dan Markel]

thanks for sharing this, Bridget.

[Vanessa Peters]

Insightful and inspiring work!
Excellent companion book to "The Isis Papers" by Francis Cress Welsing, which was the inspiration for my research and work on increasing the literacy and earning potential of African Americans by eliminating illiteracy at the inception point -- The Teaching of Learning to Read... Thank you, Vanessa Peters, Reading Activist.
http://www.sweetsoundsofreading.com/Teaching-Black-Children-to-Read.html