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What is the long-term harm and wider impact of mass incarceration on people and communities of color? The racial caste system established and perpetuated by mass incarceration continues beyond a prison sentence and extends into families, communities and society at large. The criminalization and demonization of black men creates a “prison label” of stigma and shame that damages the black community as a whole.

What is the “new Jim Crow”? Throughout its history, the United States has been structured by a racial caste system. From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, these forms of racialized social control reinvented themselves to meet the needs of the dominant social class according to the constraints of each era.

What is needed to end mass incarceration and permanently eliminate racial caste in the United States? Legal and policy solutions alone are not enough to dismantle racial caste because the methods of racial control within this system are “legal” and rarely appear as outwardly discriminatory. A social movement that confronts the role of race and cultivates an ethic of care must form or else a new racial caste system will emerge in the future.

In this lesson, students will describe aspects of their identities such as race, gender, ability, religion and more. Then after exploring Marley Dias' Black Girls Books campaign, students will analyze book illustrations and write their own book review noting how characters are similar and different from them.

Civil rights leader Malcolm X now appears in many history books and has been the hero of a feature film, but very few sources actually delve into the forms of leadership and resistance to oppression that Malcolm X advocated in the last year of his life.