Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to lecture at Yale Divinity School on February 25

Author, legal scholar, and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander will deliver a lecture on the themes of her book The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness at Yale Divinity School on Monday, Feb. 25, at 5:30 pm in Marquand Chapel. The lecture is open to the public and will be webcast live at http://new.livestream.com/yaledivinityschool/alexander.

Alexander has a joint appointment at The Ohio State University with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Previously, she was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, and director of the Civil Rights Clinic.

Much of Alexander’s work is aimed at exposing and challenging racial bias in the criminal justice system. The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, argues that the incarceration of millions of African Americans is one outcome of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, dooming the incarcerated to a permanent second-class status.

The book won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction and has been featured in national media outlets, including The New York Times, MSNBC, NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, and the Tavis Smiley Show, among others.

The New York Review of Books said, “Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is such a work… Alexander considers the evidence and concludes that our prison system is a unique form of social control, much like slavery and Jim Crow, the systems it has replaced.”

Doors will open at 5:00pm to the general public. Overflow seating (where the lecture will be streamed live on large screens) will be available in the event that Marquand Chapel reaches capacity. Yale Divinity School is located at 409 Prospect St., New Haven, CT.