Michelle Alexander
The American criminal justice system is presented not as broken but as functioning in ways that reflect its design, using the War on Drugs to rebuild a racial caste system 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 helps mask the racism of mass incarceration by attributing disproportionate arrest and imprisonment rates to individual behavioral failures rather than structural bias.
Supreme Court rulings weakened Fourth Amendment protections and blocked many claims of racial bias, granting police broad discretion to stop, search, and arrest minorities with limited accountability.