Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades–they are currently at historical lows–but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste–not class, caste–permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.

The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.

As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

There are more African-Americans under correctional control today–in prison or jail, on probation or parole–than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative: In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Most people don’t like it when I say this. Racial caste is alive and well in America. Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander