Third in a series
Re “Heavy on Racial Hype, but Where Is the Substance?”
[img]1410|left|Michelle Alexander||no_popup[/img]If a salesman ever has seduced you into buying a product you immediately regret, you know how some in the audience last Friday felt during and after Prof. Michelle Alexander’s seductive speech at the Urban Affairs Breakfast Forum.
Her explosive remarks were drawn from her new book.
The feeling during was powerfully different from the feeling after, the point of this essay.
She sounded so believable, better, so reasonable. This is a horrifying wrong that loudly demands unswerving attention, she said over and over.
After digesting the title, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Ms. Alexander’s book scarcely would not seem to require much elaboration.
Oops.
Through her sizzling 60-minute talk, she won the crowd so appealingly that she could have recruited enough troops to turn Afghanistan around before tomorrow.
All of the often puffy puzzle pieces were magnetizing together except for one.
Unnoticed, and, by design not included, was context.
Oh.
All of the black guys were not only victims but undeniably innocent, Ms. Alexander asserted. All cops guiltier than the most villainous dictator.
Ms. Alexander smothered her speech in so much brilliantly articulated misdirection that hardly anyone in the crowd noticed, until it was too late.
She was gone.
Not only did her eager audience digest, it uncritically swallowed her sharply slanted, heavily incomplete message:
Devious, racially charged cops in every state have targeted black men, especially the young. They harass, arrest, routinely plant false evidence, and prime them for an unfriendly courtrooms where judges, with scant provocation, send them away to filthy prisons for long stretches.
As a veteran of the ACLU world, when Ms. Alexander practiced law, she was familiar with the tactic of prodding a gullible crowd.
Reaching into her suitcase of Gimmicks Guaranteed to Ignite, Ms. Alexander presented a painfully slender, and slick, thesis that played so effectively the majority of listeners would have gone to war for her at that moment.
“They’re after us, they’re after us,” was her theme.
It sounded so worth fighting for.
Like Santa Claus in a helicopter dropping toys to desperately poor children below, Ms. Alexander, emoting so smoothly, slyly injected nefarious needles packed with sexy historical nuggets into the waiting arms of her listeners.
A Stanford graduate and a former member of the Stanford Law School faculty, Ms. Alexander’s oratory glistened, with a crude caveat.
She did not stoop to conquer – until she needed to resemble the unchanged, the uneducated girl from back home. Then she shrewdly slipped into talking about “black folks.” Before and after those well-timed references, she could have been reading a dense book to Bill Shakespeare.
(To be continued)
