Civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander will discuss her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness at a forum cosponsored by the national ACLU (along with the Metropolitan Black Bar Association, and The New Press) on Thursday, February 18, 2010, at 6 p.m.

The event will be held at Demos (220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor, New York NY 10001) and is open to the public. If you are interested in attending, click here to RSVP, or watch the event live on the web at www.demos.org at 3 p.m. (PST) / 6 p.m. (EST) on 2/18.

Michelle’s leadership on criminal justice reform began over 10 years ago when she was the Director of the ACLU of Northern California’s Racial Justice Project. She is currently a Professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

In The New Jim Crow she explains how “we have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it,” describing how Jim Crow laws and legal racial segregation have been replaced by mass incarceration, serving as “a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control.”

Michelle’s description of the sheer magnitude of this mass incarceration crisis (and the ulterior motivating forces behind it) is truly sobering, and the indelible impact of having a huge percentage of the African-American community permanently locked out of the mainstream society and economy is a powerful call to action for all of us fighting for justice and equality in America.

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