michelle alexander, welcome. >> thank you. thanks for having me. >> when the book came out, one reviewer called it the bible of a social movement. have you seen the apostles and the disciples and the church spreading? have you seen the signs of a movement? >> yes. and it has me so encouraged. as i travel from city to city, and i've been speaking in churches and at universities, i've been speaking inside prisons and reentry centers, just an incredible range of venues, i see over and over again people who are dedicating their lives now to ending the system of mass incarceration, to raising consciousness. people of faith who are organizing their church communities, organizing within mosques, holding study circles, holding film festivals and then organizing and mobilizing their memberships. or their congregations. i'm especially encouraged by formerly incarcerated people who are finding their voice and organizing to man the restoration of their basic civil and human rights. organizations like all of us or none which has successful

larger part of the campus intellectual project to gauge with michelle alexander's ant, which has gotten enormous amount of critical praise over the years, that has restarted conversations that activists and scholars have been having often in more silo the spaces. hassuccess of the book provided more spaces for public discourse around these questions. me, one of the great challenges of the book as well as of so much activism, particularly within african- american communities around incarceration is the unnamed and almost always unnamed assumption that this is primarily a man's problem, a problem of male bodies being stopped and frisked by police officers instead of assumptions about male gendered norms associated with black men and notions of violence and the idea that the problems of incarceration and the cost of incarceration are primarily borne by african-american men. part of what we want to do is challenge that by going to the intersection of gender and incarceration, by speaking specifically about how incarceration impacts women. we have assembled a really extraordinary panel and w

larger part of the campus intellectual project to gauge with michelle alexander's ant, which has gottennormous amount of critical praise over the years, that has restarted conversations that activists and scholars have been having often in more silo the spaces. hassuccess of the book provided more spaces for public discourse around these questions. me, one of the great challenges of the book as well as of so much activism, particularly within african- american communities around incarceration is the unnamed and almost always unnamed assumption that this is primarily a man's problem, a problem of male bodies being stopped and frisked by police officers instead of assumptions about male gendered norms associated with black men and notions of violence and the idea that the problems of incarceration and the cost of incarceration are primarily borne by african-american men. part of what we want to do is challenge that by going to the intersection of gender and incarceration, by speaking specifically about how incarceration impacts women. we have assembled a really extraordinary panel and we

it is one thing that michelle alexander did a good job of, given the conceptual framework of how it is financially incentivized. as this conversation is evolving, i'm interested in how people see working against the momentum of this economic incentive of incarceration. my other question is very simple ira present the black alumni association of tulane. we want to do a service for children for people of incarceration -- people affected by incarceration -- what services are being needed? what are people meeting -- nee ding? what is the hierarchy of that? thank you. it is new orleans- specific, do you want to take that one? >> being that i am from new orleans and you asked the question, how do we deal with it , i feel like i have been screaming the same thing. we are not going to change what is happening in the city of new orleans if we don't change the system itself. where we are paying into the criminal justice system, the fact that the prison gets more money than the program, the fact that the prison has become a way health,with addiction, when we could easily be like san francisco, ne

the community at tulane for engaging in the difficult conversations that are part of reading michele alexander's book together and the differences of opinion but that will undoubtedly bring up. i want to thank each and because the work you do is thankless work or thanked by only a few. i will say right now that i appreciate that you kept bringing us back to this idea of .ision if we can't imagine a world that is different -- my daughter parker is in sixth grade. she spent this week having to memorize the second paragraph of the declaration of independence. that said, she was very irritated by having to learn this and kept expressing her irritation as being that it wasn't true, that racism and , all theselavery words were just words and they were true. fan of the declaration of independence. it doesn't matter fully that they were true in that moment in 1776, they constituted a vision of what was possible. the notion of a matching a world where all people are created where they are endowed to something beyond the state in these fundamental rights and yet the state exists and is legitimate only to

the community at tulane for engaging in the difficult conversations that are part of reading michele alexander's book together and the differences of opinion but that will undoubtedly bring up. i want to thank each and everyone of you because the work you do is thankless work or thanked by only a few. i will say right now that i appreciate that you kept bringing us back to this idea of vision. if we can't imagine a world that is different -- my daughter parker is in sixth grade. she spent this week having to memorize the second paragraph of the declaration of independence. that said, she was very irritated by having to learn this and kept expressing her irritation as being that it wasn't true, that racism and sexism in slavery, all these words were just words and they were true. i'm a big fan of the declaration of independence. it doesn't matter fully that they were true in that moment in 1776, they constituted a vision of what was possible. the notion of a matching a world where all people are created equal, where they are endowed to something beyond the state in these fundamental rights and ye

larger part of the campus intellectual project to gauge with michelle alexander's ant, which has gotten enormous amount of critical praise over the years, that has restarted conversations that activists and scholars have been having often in more silo the spaces. hassuccess of the book provided more spaces for public discourse around these questions. me, one of the great challenges of the book as well as of so much activism, particularly within african- american communities around incarceration is the unnamed and almost always unnamed assumption that this is primarily a man's problem, a problem of male bodies being stopped and frisked by police officers instead of assumptions about male gendered norms associated with black men and notions of violence and the idea that the problems of incarceration and the cost of incarceration are primarily borne by african-american men. part of what we want to do is challenge that by going to the intersection of gender and incarceration, by speaking specifically about how incarceration impacts women. we have assembled a really extraordinary panel and w

i'm studying michelle alexander and the narratives about prison systems in the united states, and wely aggressive criminal justice system that is racially biased, profiles people of color, women of color, and at the end of the day, we have to have media and other institutions step up and shine a light on it, because these three young men, thank god, are going to be exonerated for doing nothing, but unfortunately, the aggressiveness filters too many people into it who can't get out of it, who can't go on the lawrence o'donnell show and say this is wrong. this is a key issue, mass -- that's where it lives and breathes. at the end of the day, those police officers thought they were doing their job when they saw those young men. and this goes back to like the black codes. it goes back to moments in history that we look back on and say, wow, we don't want to be that america. we are that america. >> you know, technology plays such a role in this. when you think about the rodney king case, the reason we knew about it was the then relatively new technology of home video. the reason this got

. >> there's a wonderful quote by cornell west at the beginning of the ichbtduction of michelle alexander'srow" if white males were locked up at young blackmail -- males there would be a national crisis. >> if this had been happening to white people, this would be national headlines. >> pretty tough interviews on. >> it an example of a type of profiling that is done uniform is in california dui stops. the don't just stop -- they don't let mercedes drive through the stop and only stop so-called poor cars, et cetera. everybody gets stopped at a dui stop. they set up across the road if you do a u turn you get caught. if you're going to stop people, follow people, follow everybody. stop everybody. stop the guys in wall street on the way to work and see if they have any illegal prescription drugs in their pocket. >> we just had a narrow election in new york where stop and frisk was a big issue. the police have been enormously successful in new york. crime is down enormously. yet the way the law had been enforced in black neighborhoods or minority neighborhoods got people so angry they were ready

the community at tulane for engaging in the difficult conversations that are part of reading michele alexander's book together and the differences of opinion but that will undoubtedly bring up. i want to thank each and because the work you do is thankless work or thanked by only a few. i will say right now that i appreciate that you kept bringing us back to this idea of .ision if we can't imagine a world that is different -- my daughter parker is in sixth grade. she spent this week having to memorize the second paragraph of the declaration of independence. that said, she was very irritated by having to learn this and kept expressing her irritation as being that it wasn't true, that racism and , all theselavery words were just words and they were true. fan of the declaration of independence. it doesn't matter fully that they were true in that moment in 1776, they constituted a vision of what was possible. the notion of a matching a world where all people are created where they are endowed to something beyond the state in these fundamental rights and yet the state exists and is legitimate only to

where we still have michelle alexander calls it the new jim crow, the new interracialism.president, so it's okay. and you see something as innocent as this really sweet ad, and people still freak out. and when it comes to king, and would republicans think black people are is their fault. when you're defunding, like schools and social programs and you wage this war on poverty and african-american communities, then they're going to become your stereotypes. >> but part of what's interesting about the congressman king, if we connect it back to our "duck dynasty" moment, and not so much the comments about homosexuality, but the comments about race that came out of robertson at that point, is that they are talking about their own experiences. they're saying, my dad had a ranch and this is what i saw and experienced, right? i worked in these circumstances and this is what i saw and experienced. and there is something kind of -- there's a kind of lovely racial kninaivete, that your bef that what you're seeing from a latino, that's all of them. because they disappear. because they'

and you can't ignore this with like michelle alexander, the new jim crow, books like that.ceration issues of people who shouldn't even be in the prison in the first place because they had one rock, you know, and it didn't make any sense. when we talk about rodgers, this is a chain of command. if this is supposed to be the one thing that the president does have as his total power and we have this little underling person who has decide head wants to be judge and jury and that he can lie to the president of the united states and have no consequences for it? that is troubling to me. so that means already that we have somebody in the pipeline who's preventing the president from making the kinds of choices he wants to make because he has deemed that these people should not be in the pool to get -- >> is there any movement around having consequences, having rodgers held to account? it seems to me if you're saying he's holding 5,000 additional people's cases from, you know, coming up for a pardon, it does seem incredible that there's no outside pressure being brought to bear agains