I’ve had a startling experience—even though “I knew it all” before. But it didn’t add up until I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

Everything connects with everything, but the role that the incarceration of black men in America has played and continues to play seems suddenly a greater crisis than bad schools, or even poverty. If we—white Americans—were truly concerned about the “achievement gap,” it’s the gap in incarceration rates where we might start. No, it isn’t a fact that it all starts with “pathology” or the “culture of poverty.”

Go to the original…