Few issues have vexed American politics more than the question of whether — and to what extent — the criminal-justice system is biased against black Americans. More than any other book, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, inspired a moral and political reckoning over race and our criminal-justice system. Published in 2010, the book featured on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly five years. Ibram Kendi said it was “the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.”
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Alexander’s book claims that American history should be understood as a cyclical struggle between white supremacists and advocates for racial justice. While advocates for racial justice eventually succeeded in overthrowing systems of racial oppression (as they did in the case of slavery and Jim Crow), white supremacists have been resilient. Thus, after the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Alexander says, white segregationists waged a new drug war that stirred up racialized fears of urban crime and social breakdown. In this way, Jim Crow — a system of racial oppression and social control — was reborn, just in a more sinister form. The new system might have appeared fair and race neutral on the surface, but in fact, it was designed to subjugate black Americans.
Alexander’s book has become a staple of college syllabi.
The same cannot be said, though, of Michael Fortner’s seminal book, Black Silent Majority, published by Harvard University Press in 2015. While Fortner shared Alexander’s condemnation of the modern drug war, he disputed her account of its origins. Our draconian drug laws, Fortner found, grew out of the concerns of black working- and middle-class New Yorkers, who were seeking to protect their values and interests in the face of rising crime in the 1970s. Unlike Alexander, then, Fortner didn’t find a racist conspiracy at the heart of the drug war. Instead, he argued that its origins were more complex and tragic. And he rejected Alexander’s sense that blacks were merely the subjects, never the agents, of modern American history.
Fortner’s book attracted widespread acclaim. It won the 2016 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History, awarded by the New York Academy of History. The New York Times Book Review selected Black Silent Majority as an “Editors’ Choice” in 2015, while it received a Pulitzer Prize nomination as well. Even so, since 2016 Black Silent Majority was assigned only 53 times with Alexander’s book. That means that it was taught with The New Jim Crow in less than 2% of the courses in the database.