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. The lecture, which will be held in Marquand Chapel, is open to the public and will be followed by a question-and-answer session.

Alexander is on the faculty of The Ohio State University, where she has a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as 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 radio and television media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, the Tavis Smiley Show, C-Span, and Washington Journal, among others.

At YDS, The New Jim Crow has been the subject of a community-wide read during 2012-13, part of a yearlong discernment process aimed at ensuring a welcoming environment for all as the school becomes increasingly diverse.  Alexander’s visit to YDS is a capstone event in that process.

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.”

The Yale Divinity School community will be given priority seating for the lecture up until 5:00 pm, at which time the general public may enter Marquand Chapel. 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.