http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/05/michelle-alexander-speaks-legalized-discrimination/
Perspectives
Michelle Alexander Speaks Out on “The New Jim Crow"
At New York’s Union Theological Seminary Wednesday evening, legal
scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander, author of the best
selling The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
spoke to a capacity crowd and invited everyone there “to explore the
meaning of race and justice at a particularly critical moment in our
nation’s history, a time when it seems as though we may be once again at
a fork in the road.”
She began, “A nation founded with lofty
ideals of freedom and equality but extending those ideals to wealthy
white men only is the founding paradox of our nation to this day… Even
now, as a black man sits in the Oval Office. For years now I have been
obsessed with this paradox — not its theoretical existence but its
concrete manifestation in the brutal system of mass incarceration, a
penal system unlike anything the world has ever seen.”
Alexander
described a society in which one third of black American men spend time
behind bars, a figure that jumps to 60 percent for those without a high
school diploma. They experience “legalized discrimination for the rest
of their lives… Once branded a criminal or felon you are ushered into a
parallel social universe in which the basic civil and human rights that
apply to others no longer apply to you.”
Alexander’s appearance,
hosted by Union’s Institute for Women, Religion and Globalization was
the Fifth Annual Judith Davidson Moyers Women of Spirit Lecture, a
public forum to discuss the most pressing global issues faced by present
day women leaders of faith — issues including environmental justice,
poverty, war and women’s education.
Judith Davidson Moyers is CEO of Public Affairs Television.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T79I1PLT5Ks&feature=youtu.be
Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow, at Union Theological Seminary
March 4, 2015
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29471-michelle-alexander-roots-of-today-s-mass-incarceration-crisis-date-to-slavery-jim-crow
Michelle Alexander: Roots of Today's Mass Incarceration Crisis Date to Slavery, Jim Crow
Thursday, 05 March 2015
By Amy Goodman and Juan González, Democracy Now! |
Video Interview:
As the Justice Department sheds new light on the racist criminal
justice system in Ferguson, legal scholar Michelle Alexander looks at
the historical roots of what she describes as "the new Jim Crow." From
mass incarceration to police killings to the drug war, Alexander
explores how the crisis is a nationwide issue facing communities of
color. "Today we see millions of poor people and folks of color who are
trapped, yet again, in a criminal justice system which are treating them
like commodities, like people who are easily disposable," Alexander
says. "We are not on the right path. … It’s not about making minor
reforms and plodding along in the same direction. No, its about
mustering the courage to have a major reassessment of where we are as
America, reckon with our racial history as well as our present, and
build a broad-based movement rooted in the awareness of the dignity and
humanity of us all."
TRANSCRIPT:
TRANSCRIPT:
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, part of the Justice Department’s investigation in Ferguson focused on traffic stops and found African Americans, who account for about two-thirds of the city’s population, made up 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of citations, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of cases in which police used force. African-American drivers were twice as likely as whites to be searched, but were less likely to be found with drugs or guns than whites. And in all 14 incidents in which a police dog bit the suspect and the person’s race is known, the person bitten was African-American. The findings reinforce details of a class-action lawsuit filed by Ferguson residents, who accuse local officials of creating a "modern debtors’ prison scheme" that targets African Americans with arrest and fines, and then locks them up when they can’t pay. Here on Democracy Now!, we spoke with Herbert Nelson Jr., a plaintiff in the lawsuit, who has been arrested multiple times. He was asked how his experience made him feel about the police.
HERBERT NELSON JR.: That’s a good question, because the last time I was arrested, the officer said I shouldn’t be afraid of officers. But that same officer, he actually—he was like, "Yes!" He was so excited to arrest me. And that alone made me afraid, because a lot of my friends and family won’t even come to see me because I live in Jennings. They’re scared to come into the county of North St. Louis, North County St. Louis, because of the police and how quick they are to arrest you over a minor, minor, minor traffic ticket.
AARON MATÉ: Herbert, when we were there, there was some hope among some residents that we spoke to that things might get better in the aftermath of these protests, of this organizing in Ferguson and the surrounding areas. Has anything improved in the six months since Michael Brown was killed?
HERBERT NELSON JR.: Far as the policing, no, it hasn’t. It hasn’t. And I wouldn’t honestly say it improved. No, actually, it began—it got worse, because it seems like the crime has went up, and the police are really—the jails are just running in an out, like they’re way more packed than they were before Mike Brown was shot. The jails are way more packed. So it hasn’t improved at all.
AMY GOODMAN:
So that’s Herbert Nelson Jr., who is a plaintiff in this lawsuit, who’s
been arrested multiple times. He was sitting next to his sister,
Allison. One of her arrests—it’s their mother who comes constantly to
the jail to give money. One of her arrests was being in the car with a
suspended license. The problem was she was in her backyard in a parked
car just sitting inside. And for that, she was taken away. So, Michelle
Alexander, broaden this story, from arrests to what they’re calling
"modern-day debtors’ prisons."
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Yes, you know, I think this is part of the story that many people are
unaware of, the ways in which poor people, particularly poor folks of
color, are targeted by our criminal justice system, arrested for
extremely minor offenses, the very sorts of crimes that occur with equal
frequency in middle-class communities or on college campuses but go
largely ignored—targeted, arrested or cited, and then saddled with fines
and fees that are nearly impossible for them to pay back. Then warrants
are issued for their arrest, for failure to appear in court or to pay
back their fees or fines in a timely manner, leading them into a system
from which they have little hope of ever truly escaping.
And, you know, we can look back in history and see this is not the first time we’ve done something like this. Slavery by Another Name
is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how,
following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control
was born, known as "convict leasing." You know, after the end of
slavery, African-American men were arrested in mass, and they were
arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering, standing around,
vagrancy or the equivalent of jaywalking—arrested and then sent to
prison and then leased to plantations. And the idea was they were
supposed to earn their freedom, but they could never pay back the
plantation owners or the corporations the costs of their clothing and
shelter, and so they were effectively re-enslaved, you know, sometimes
for the rest of their lives. And today we see millions of poor people
and folks of color who are trapped yet again in a criminal justice
system, you know, which are treating them like commodities and like
people who are easily disposable.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And the impact of this not only for those who, let’s say, are jailed
and then lose their voting rights for a period of time, but even for
those who are arrested and then this stays on their record, and then the
issue of being able to get a job with your arrest record, available to
employers now with databases being able to locate any kind of
information—the impact of this on the ability of African Americans and
other people of color to be able to have some kind of social mobility
and move forward?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
That’s absolutely right. You know, I hear people often say, "Oh, come
on, it’s just a misdemeanor. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like
they have a felony." Well, today, a misdemeanor can show up on your
record, through a few keystrokes on the computer by an employer, and it
can be the reason that you’re denied an opportunity to work. It can also
be the reason you’re denied access to housing. Public housing officials
are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records,
including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even
for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a
permanent second-class status and struggling to survive. So I think it’s
critically important that we not dismiss these kinds of charges that
are being brought against folks as being minor and shrug them off. No,
they can actually alter the course of one’s life.
AMY GOODMAN:
Michelle, I was wondering if you can read the first paragraph of your
book. This is a stunning story that goes back to slavery that I think is
so important, that leads us right into this weekend, the 50th
anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, people marching 50 years
ago for voting rights, but where we are today, 50 years later.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather,
great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the
right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree
tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the
United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy
promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws
that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote
as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux
Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting
by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes
and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like
many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is
currently on parole."
AMY GOODMAN: So, where are we today, 50 years after Selma, not to mention how many years after slavery?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Well, you know, I think it’s common today for people to say,
particularly on Martin Luther King Day, you know, that we’ve come a long
way, but we still have a long, long way to go. And, you know, I think
the events of recent months, as well as the astonishing rates of
incarceration and the existence of this permanent second-class status
that entraps millions, shows us that, no, we’re not on the right path.
It’s not a matter of having a long, long way to go. We’ve taken a U-turn
and are off course entirely. You know, that’s why I say over and over
again it’s not about, you know, making minor reforms and plodding along
in the same direction. No, it’s about mustering in the courage to have a
major reassessment of where we are as America, reckon with our racial
history as well as our present, and build a broad-based movement rooted
in the awareness of the dignity and humanity of us all, no matter who we
are, where we came from or what we may have done.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And yet, we have a Supreme Court that only recently eviscerated the
Voting Rights Act in a decision. I’m wondering your reaction when you
heard that decision.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Well, I think it’s a reflection of where we are at this particular
moment. You know, I believe the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a very
large swath of the American population, really wants to imagine that
race and racial inequality is something we don’t have to think about
anymore, don’t have to worry about anymore. Colorblindness in the United
States today means being blind to racial inequality, does not mean
being blind to race itself. And that’s the moment we’re in. And the
question is: How do we respond? And so, I am thrilled by the protests
that we’ve seen, the creative, courageous, nonviolent protests, but now
the question is: How do we transition from protest politics to long-term
movement building?
AMY GOODMAN:
You know, just recently John Legend and rapper Common won the Oscar for
best original song for "Glory," which was featured in the movie Selma. Legend paid tribute to protesters from the civil rights era to today.
JOHN LEGEND: Nina Simone said it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live. We wrote this song for a film that was based on events that were 50 years ago, but we say that Selma is now, because the struggle for justice is right now.
COMMON: Yeah.
JOHN LEGEND: We know that the Voting Rights Act that they fought for 50 years ago is being compromised right now in this country today. We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on. God bless you.
AMY GOODMAN: That was John Legend standing next to Common. They both won the Oscar for best song in Selma. Of course, Selma,
though it was nominated for best film, it didn’t win. And Ava DuVernay,
who was hailed as the director of this film, a young African-American
woman, was not nominated for best director. Neither was David Oyelowo
for best actor. In fact, there were no black actors or directors who
were nominated this year, leading to that hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite. But
after John Legend spoke, many commentators said he was actually citing
your work, Michelle Alexander. If you can talk about the significance of
this? I mean, tens of millions of people saw this. Of course, culture
is so important in getting out information.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Yeah, I was just so proud of John Legend for using his moment on that
stage to speak to the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States
and to raise awareness of the toll that it has taken on the
African-American community. And I am hopeful that more celebrities and
people who have a big microphone will follow his lead and begin speaking
up and speaking out, because, you know, we are not going to be able to
engage in this movement building if we remain asleep and in denial about
its existence, because, you know, unlike the old Jim Crow, there are no
signs alerting us to the existence of this new caste system. And if
you’re not directly impacted, if you yourself have not been branded a
felon or are cycling in and out of prison or forced to check the box on
employment applications, if this doesn’t actually affect you directly,
you can go your whole life and have no idea what is really going on. And
so, if we are going to build this movement, we’re going to have to pull
back the curtain, speak courageous truths, like John Legend did, and
help to inspire a much broader awakening, so that the work of real
movement building can get underway.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
I wanted to ask you about another tragic shooting and the aftermath of
that shooting, the Tamir Rice shooting, the 12-year-old boy who was shot
by police, holding a toy gun. And the mayor of Cleveland recently
apologized because the attorneys for the city of Cleveland argued in a
legal brief that Tamir was responsible for his own death.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And just wondering again about the way that the legal system convolutes
its own reasoning just to be able to come up with justifications for
what happens.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Well, I thought, you know, what transpired there, where, in papers
filed in court, they blame that boy for the fact that the police showed
up and killed him within two seconds of their arrival, and said it was
his fault, that somehow he had brought this police response upon him, in
so many ways, that is an illustration of the larger system of mass
incarceration, where those who are targeted and who find themselves
behind bars are blamed, and said, "Well, it’s your fault. You brought
all of this on yourself." And, in fact, you know, over the last few
decades, I think many in the African-American community have been
seduced by the argument that, well, this is all our fault. Somehow we’ve
brought mass incarceration upon ourselves. If only we would pull up our
pants or stay in school or not experiment with drugs, if only somehow
we could be perfect and never make a mistake, that none of this would be
happening. But, of course, you know, young white kids who make
mistakes, commit misdemeanors and jaywalking and smoke weed, they are
able to go off to college if they’re middle-class. But if you’re poor or
you live in the hood, the kinds of mistakes that people of all colors
and classes make actually cost them their lives. And yet, then we turn
around and blame them and say, "This is all your fault."
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, and then we’re going to come back to this discussion with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: John Legend and Common singing "Glory," the Oscar-winning song from the film Selma. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re with Michelle Alexander,
professor of law at Ohio State University in Columbus. She’s a civil
rights advocate. She’s author of the best-selling book, [The New] Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Michelle, talk about your own transformation. And then let’s talk about
what you feel needs to change mass incarceration in this country. But
what happened to you?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Oh, yes, what happened to me? You know, when I began working as a civil
rights lawyer and advocate, I understood, I got, that our criminal
justice system was biased in many ways, and I assumed that it was biased
just like every institution in our society is infected, to some degree
or another, with conscious or unconscious bias and stereotyping. And so I
thought, well, it’s my job just to join with other advocates and
lawyers to root out racial bias whenever, wherever it might rear its
ugly head in the criminal justice system. And it really wasn’t, you
know, until after years of representing victims of racial profiling and
police brutality, and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in
poor communities of color, and attempting to assist people who had been
released from prison, you know, "re-enter," only to have one closed door
in their face after another, that I had a series of experiences that
really began my own awakening. And I came to see that our criminal
justice system isn’t just another institution in our society infected
with racial bias, but, you know, really a different beast entirely.
And, you know, at that time, there were
activists who were saying that. You know, at the beginning of the book, I
talk about how I saw posted on a telephone pole a sign that said, "the
drug war is the new Jim Crow," and I just dismissed that as nonsense.
You know, yeah, our system is biased, but you can’t compare it to Jim
Crow or slavery. You know, that’s absurd. But I had a number of
experiences that began to open my eyes. And one of them included a young
man who came to me with a story of being framed by the police and drugs
being planted on him, and I didn’t believe him. And it was only after I
came to see that he was telling the truth about vast corruption that
was happening in the Oakland Police Department, and that my own biases
and stereotypes and my own class privilege had prevented me from hearing
him, acknowledging the truth and seeing the reality of what was hidden
in plain sight. And that’s really what began my journey of doing an
enormous amount of research and trying to listen much more carefully to
the stories of those cycling in and out of prison.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
Well, we’re going through, here in New York City right now, this
startling number of cases that are now being reviewed, and especially in
Brooklyn, that were at the height of the crack epidemic, and scores of
people who were sentenced to prison with false testimony, with police
coercion witnesses, and now, one after another, people are being
released after spending years in prison because it was all false
testimony that was put together by police officers against African
Americans and Latinos. It’s become a huge scandal. But it’s precisely
that the people could not believe that the system was this corrupt—
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —that it was doing this on a massive scale.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
That’s exactly right. No, who do we believe? Who do we listen to? Who
do we hear from? Who do we believe? You know, and over the last few
decades, we’ve heard from the police, we’ve heard from politicians,
we’ve heard from prosecutors. But very rarely do we hear the stories,
you know, in the media, of the people who have been targeted and
demonized. And even when we do, how often do we disbelieve them and
think, "Oh, it must be exaggeration. It must be over the top"? But what
we’ve seen with the Justice Department report, what we see with the
overwhelming evidence that I tried to put in my book, is that we need to
pay a lot more attention to the stories and the lived experiences of
people who have been trapped in the system of mass incarceration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
I wanted to ask you about another aspect of mass incarceration that has
obviously been mushrooming in recent years. About 50 percent of all
federal prosecutions these days are actually immigration-related
prosecutions.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And you’re having the growth of these private prisons and the mass
incarceration of immigrants. Congress, just in attempting to fund
Homeland Security, is insisting that everybody who comes in from Central
America be jailed while—if they’re caught coming across the border.
This whole issue of this expansion of mass incarceration to the
immigrant and largely Latino population in the country?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
That’s exactly right. You know, what we see is that this system of mass
incarceration, in order to continue to grow, is adapting and is looking
for new populations to bring under its control. And particularly the
profit motive in the private prison industry is helping to drive much of
that impulse. And so, when we talk about ending mass incarceration, we
must, in the same breath, talk about ending mass deportation and the
criminalization of immigrant communities in the United States today. You
know, we see that the same racially divisive politics that gave rise to
the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, those same racially
divisive politics are now taking aim at immigrant communities and
helping to ensure the continued expansion of the prison-industrial
complex, you know, by including immigrants under its control.
AMY GOODMAN: Your book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
came out under President Obama. What is your assessment? Has President
Obama, being the first African-American president, made any difference?
Has it made things better? When it comes to the whole issue of mass
incarceration, have things gotten worse?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
It’s better and worse. It’s better and worse, you know. I mean, there
are—I think having an African-American president has been a beautiful,
wonderful thing in many ways. I know that I’m grateful that my children
know a world where a black man can be president of the United States. It
makes a difference to them to know that that’s possible, that such a
thing is possible. But I think there’s also been real difficulties as a
result of his presidency. One of them is the reluctance, I think, among
African Americans to be as courageous in their criticism and their
critique of the drug war and mass incarceration and, you know, many of
the policies that we see continuing under the Obama administration than
they might otherwise be.
You know, the reality is that the rhetoric has
changed in the Obama administration, but when you take a look at the
policies, they’ve been much, much slower to change. So, you know, under
the Obama administration, we’ve heard consecutive drugs czars say that
we should no longer be at war with our own people, you know, saying we
don’t like the language of the drug war. But then when you look at the
drug war budget, basically the same ratio of dollars is invested in
enforcement, as opposed to treatment and prevention, as under the Bush
administrations and earlier administrations. And so, you know, I think
that it’s very tempting to imagine that more progress has been achieved
when there is an African American in the White House and a black
attorney general saying all the right things, but I think we have to not
be so easily seduced by the imagery and insist upon the kind of
large-scale policy reform and structural reform and in end to the actual
war on drugs, not the language.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in February, FBI
Director James Comey called for police nationwide to confront what he
said is unconscious racial bias in the wake of a spate of killings of
unarmed African Americans. In the speech, Comey said the nation’s
endemic racism must be addressed.
JAMES COMEY: Much research points to the widespread existence of unconscious bias. Many people in our white-majority culture have unconscious racial biases and react differently to a white face than a black face. … Police officers on patrol in our nation’s cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color. Something happens to people of goodwill working in that environment. After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel. A mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible, and maybe even rational by some lights. … We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was FBI
Director James Comey talking about unconscious bias, not
institutionalized use of racial discrimination. But I’m wondering your
reaction to his pretty unusual comments for an FBI director.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Well, you know, I have to applaud him for acknowledging that, you know,
there is both conscious and unconscious bias that pervades law
enforcement today. You know, he tends to attribute it to police officers
being in constant contact with black and brown criminals, and that that
jades them. I think that that—you know, that that tells only a very
small part of the larger story. The reality is we have been at war with
certain communities. Our elected officials declared wars on crime and
wars on drugs, which really were not wars on either of those things, but
were wars on communities defined by race and class. And that war
mentality has infected law enforcement in ways that, you know, seem
nearly irreparable. And so, I think it’s important for us to recognize
that these biases and stereotypes that exist within law enforcement
isn’t simply a product of having to deal with a lot of bad guys on the
streets, but it’s the product of a war mentality that has been adopted
and institutionalized throughout law enforcement agencies in the United
States.
AMY GOODMAN:
What needs to happen? You talk about a movement that has to happen. But
also, as you’ve looked particularly at mass incarceration, what has to
change?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Well, I think a number of things have to change. You know, there’s a
whole laundry list of reforms that need to be adopted. But I think we
really need to come from the perspective not how do we tinker with this
thing or tweak it, but what would a truly just system look like? Would
we criminalize the simple possession of drugs for personal use? Would we
do that? Or would we treat drug use and drug addiction as a public
health problem rather than a crime? Would we follow the lead of a
country like Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs across the
board and stopped caging people who may be in the need of help, and
investing in drug treatment and education and support for the
communities from which they come? So, we need to end the war on drugs
and the war mentality that we have, which means ending zero-tolerance
policies. It means transforming our criminal justice system from one
that is purely punitive to one that is based on principles of
restorative and transformative justice, you know, systems that take
seriously the interests of the victim, the offender and the community as
a whole. We need to abolish all of the laws that authorize legal
discrimination against people who have criminal records, legal
discrimination that denies them basic human rights—to work, to shelter,
to education, to food. You know, we have to decriminalize—
AMY GOODMAN: To vote?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER:
Yes—immigration. We have to grant the right to vote not just to people
upon release from prison. You know, so I have trouble with the framing
of this as being a movement to end disenfranchisement laws, and say we
should be allowing people in prison to vote, like many other Western
democracies do. There are often voting drives within prisons in other
Western democracies. And here in the United States, we deny people the
right to vote not only when they’re in prison, but often when they’re
out, and sometimes for the rest of their lives. So, there is so much
work to be done in transitioning from a war mentality to a mentality
where we extend care, compassion and concern to poor people and people
of color, and not respond with a purely punitive impulse.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michelle Alexander, we thank you so much for being with us. The conversation continues. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
She is a law professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. She’ll be
speaking tonight at Union Theological Seminary, the Judith Moyers
lecture, and on Friday night at the Columbia University conference,
"Beyond the Bars: Transforming (In)Justice."
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may
not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
source.
Juan González
Juan González co-host's Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.
González has been a professional journalist for more than 30 years and a
staff columnist at the New York Daily News since 1987. He is a two-time
recipient of the George Polk Award.
Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy
Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing
on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time
Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with
NBC's Meet the Press.
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NBC's Meet the Press.
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