The center of the carceral state is not, it turns out, the cold, frozen heart of the conservative dominated by an openly racist animus, but the warm, bleeding heart of liberalism, throbbing with feelings of goodness and tolerance.
I published “A Look at How Liberals Led America Into Having the Highest Prison Rate in The World” on Alternet. It’s a review of Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Here’s an excerpt:
Murakawa uses Nixon’s more familiar formulation as a springboard to jump back in time and demonstrate that what has been widely read as a conservative watershed moment was in fact presaged by liberal policies twenty years prior. Her book is a critique and indictment of “postwar racial liberalism,” which was (and is) based on a diagnosis of racism as a personal, internal problem of character rather than a range of systemic and deliberately wrought economic and social policies specifically designed to occlude progress and opportunities for non-white people.
You can read the rest here.