How Did We Get Here?

This month, Sarah Nayeem, an academic outpatient child and adolescent psychiatrist, based in Columbus, Ohio, reviews Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander is a lawyer and legal scholar whose research features prominently in Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th. The central thesis of “New Jim Crow,” published in a 10th anniversary edition this year, is that Americans must “reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery.”2 From Nayeem’s perspective, Alexander’s book is a powerful antiamnestic. It is a book with research that not only validates the lived experience of many but that also jars awake those who, like the dissociated driver arriving at a destination reflecting about the journey (“How did I get here?”), may have found themselves arriving at 2020 and the murder of George Floyd wondering, “How did we get here?”