Michelle Alexander
The American criminal justice system is not broken but functioning exactly as designed, using the War on Drugs to quietly rebuild a racial caste system that disenfranchises Black Americans under the guise of colorblindness.
The War on Drugs was initiated as a political strategy to suppress and manage minority populations before crack cocaine even emerged as a public health crisis.
The ideology of colorblindness serves to mask the systemic racism of mass incarceration by attributing vastly disproportionate arrest and imprisonment rates to individual behavioral failures rather than structural bias.
Supreme Court rulings have systematically dismantled Fourth Amendment protections and blocked claims of racial bias, granting police broad discretion to stop, search, and arrest minorities without accountability.