In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that, “An extraordinary percentage of Black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have throughout most of American history.” Throughout Alexander’s book, she explains how incarceration is the tool used to disenfranchise formerly imprisoned voters and that a racist lawmaking and penal system in the United States replaced Jim Crow laws as the mechanism to do so.
In July 2021, Democrats Abroad Switzerland - Basel will host an online letter and postcard writing solidarity action to support those who are currently incarcerated in Virginia and Florida--two states where voting rights can be restored to incarcerated individuals upon their release from prison.
During the letter and postcard writing solidarity action, 20 minutes of instruction and guidance will be provided to help you write voting rights-based content to a currently incarcerated person. The action comes from @prisonculture’s 9 Solidarity Commitments to/with Incarcerated People for 2021. The 20-minute instruction will be recorded, and will be shared upon request.
To learn more about how justice reform emanates from ideas in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and aligns with the Black Lives Matter movement, please see these resources about
- Mass Incarceration and Criminalization or Incarcerated Women and Girls from The Sentencing Project (h/t @prisonculture)
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Black Lives Matter Movement by its founders: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi
- Garza’s “A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement” from The Feminist Wire;
- Garza, Cullors, and Tometi’s “Black Lives Matter Founders Describe 'Paradigm Shift' In The Movement” from NPR
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Black Lives Matter Syllabus by Frank Leon Roberts
- Roberts’s “5 Ways of Understanding Black Lives Matter” on YouTube
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Voting Rights and Restoration (h/t Ibram X. Kendi)
- Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot (h/t Ibram X. Kendi)
- Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote (h/t Ibram X. Kendi)
Other resources: You can design, write, and send postcards using the Swiss Post PostCard Creator App, available on the App Store and Google Play.