TEACHING TOLERANCE A PROJECT OF THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER TOLERANCE.ORG WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT Teaching The New Jim Crow with Michelle Alexander JUNE CHRISTIAN Good evening and welcome to tonight’s webinar, Teaching The New Jim Crow with Mi- chelle Alexander. We’re excited to preview our new teaching guide, Teaching The New Jim Crow, with the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblind- ness, Michelle Alexander. I’d like to welcome Michelle to the webinar. MICHELLE ALEXANDER Thank you so much, June. Go ahead. JUNE CHRISTIAN Okay, before I go into the full introduction of Michelle for those of you who may not be fa- miliar with our esteemed guest this evening, please allow me to share a bit about Teaching Tolerance. We’re a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1991 to curtail the recruitment of youth into extremist hate groups. TT’s mission is to reduce prejudice, improve intergroup relationships and to help create equitable school environments. If you have not already yet signed up for our weekly newsletter, please do so at tolerance.org. We have a number of quality anti-bias resources for teachers, counselors and school adminis- trators, including lessons, a variety of publications and film kits. These resources are free of charge and can be downloaded at tolerance.org. We also encourage all K-12 teachers to sign up for our Teaching Tolerance magazine. We publish two print magazines in the fall and spring and an iPad edition in the summer. Please sign up at tolerance.org. Have you checked out Perspective for Diverse America yet? Perspective is our K-12 anti-bias literacy curriculum, aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Perspectives offers teachers the opportunity to teach complex, culturally relevant texts that enables students to see into the experiences of others in addition to reflecting their own experiences. We believe students deserve rigor and relevant texts like The New Jim Crow. Please take a mo- ment to build an Integrated Learning Plan at perspective.tolerance.org. A few housekeeping issues for tonight’s webinar. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you’ll notice a few icons. The yellow button with the question mark is the help guide. Click this button and you can access resources and information to resolve issues you may ex- perience during the webcast. Next to that button is another yellow button that if clicked, will maximize or minimize the webinar slides. The next button, a blue button with a movie projector, is the media player. You can control the volume level with the media player and if you are watching this webinar on demand, you can pause the webinar using the controls TOLERANCE.ORG found in the media player. The red Q&A icon is for questions. Please type your technical questions as well as any questions you may have for Michelle or about the guide in the Q&A box. You’ll find resources from this teaching guide in the green folder icon. Michelle’s intro- duction to the guide in this box along with other resources, I will reference as we preview Teaching The New Jim Crow. If you click the purple button, you can send us an email. We appreciate your feedback and we hope you’ll share this webinar with your friends. Anyone can view the webinar on de- mand after tonight’s broadcast. Please click the green button with what appears to be a less- than mathematical symbol and share this webinar broadly across all your social networks. We love to see every teacher across the nation teach The New Jim Crow. Should you have a question about some of the concepts raised tonight or in The New Jim Crow, we’ve included the option for you to look it up on Wikipedia. We appreciate your feedback and look for- ward to hearing your thoughts about tonight’s webinar. You can minimize and maximize any of the windows with just a click of your mouse. Before we jump into previewing the guide, please allow me to introduce tonight’s guest. Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. In recent years, she taught at a number of universities including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinic. In 2005, she won the Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow. In that same year, she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. Since its first publi- cation, The New Jim Crow has received rave reviews and has been featured in national ra- dio and television media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, Bill Moyers Journal, Tavis Smiley, C-SPAN and Washington Journal, among others. In March, the book won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction. Prior to entering academia, Alexander served as the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the Project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, coalition building and litigation. The Project’s priority areas were educational equity and criminal justice reform. It was during those years at the ACLU that she began to awaken to the reality that our nation’s criminal justice system functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control. She became passion- ate about exposing and challenging racial bias in the criminal justice system, ultimately launching and leading a major campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement known as the DWB Campaign or Driving While Black or Brown Campaign. In addition to her nonprofit advocacy experience, Michelle has worked as a litigator at private law firms including Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, in Oakland, California, where she specialized in plaintiff-side, class-action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination. Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the Supreme Court. She currently devotes much of her time to freelance writing, public speaking, consulting with advocacy organizations committed to ending mass incarceration and most important, raising her 2 TOLERANCE.ORG three young children, the most challenging and rewarding job of all. Again, thank you, Mi- chelle, for joining us this evening. MICHELLE ALEXANDER Well, thank you so much, June, and everybody at Teaching Tolerance for all of the incred- ibly hard work that has gone into creating this curriculum based on The New Jim Crow. I want to thank those who have joined this webinar tonight and hopefully there are many, many teachers who are joining the webinar, who are intending to use this curriculum in their classrooms. I won’t repeat tonight all that I said during the last webinar. I believe that it’s available for viewing on the Teaching Tolerance website. If you missed that one, I described in some detail the thesis of the book, the structure of the argument and why I believe it’s so important for young people to have the opportunity to explore the issues and arguments raised in this book. Since that webinar, I’ve now spoken with dozens more teachers who have told me that they are very eager to get the curriculum in their hands and put it to good use. Over and over I’ve heard that the curriculum is coming out at precisely the perfect time, coming on the heels of the uprisings in Ferguson and the great amount of discussion that’s occurring among young people today around race and the true meaning of justice. Young people are talk- ing, talking about uprisings in Ferguson, the killing of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis and Michael Brown. Many have formed opinions, many are confused, profoundly confused about the meaning and significance of all that they see in the media and hear from friends or others. Many feel hurt and angry and of course there are many young people who are profoundly ignorant or indifferent, but very, very few young people are provided with an opportu- nity to talk openly and honestly about race in their schools. Even fewer are afforded the chance to explore how and why our racial history matters so much to our present and why a seemingly colorblind criminal justice system has managed to produce such widely racially disparate results. These are issues that our young people are thinking about on their own with very little support from teachers or educational institutions for the most part. I think this is not only a shame for those young people, but poses a real threat to our democracy as a whole. As a nation, we’ve quintupled our prison population in a stunningly short period of time. We went and brought a prison population of around 300,000 in the early 1980s to now a prison population that’s over 2 million with several million more folks who are under correctional control. Here we are—50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—and another massive system of racial and social control has been born again in this country. [A] penal system unprecedented in world history. A literal war is being waged within our own borders, a drug war, complete with all of the military gear that was on display in Ferguson. We have man- aged to create a vast new system, something that the world has never seen before, a penal system unlike anything that has ever existed anywhere else in the world.