Facebook Meme ~ Day 6

So recently there was a meme on Facebook where the person picks 7 books no explanation no reason just pick a book and spread the love. Instead I thought I would put the 7 books here over the week and explain why I picked them

Day 6

Summary:
"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

Reason

There is rarely a book that comes along that makes me stop and think. One that makes me angry and one that makes me want to change the world. Also there is rarely a book that comes along and makes me question my own privilege as a white female. There is rarely a book that can make me put it down and still keep thinking about it for months afterwards. A book that makes me continuously go back to it and pick up a different chapter at different times and make me re-read it to see how does this situation apply to this. Rarely is there a book that has made me look at race in such an honest way that I have re-evaluated things in my own life, upbringing, and experiences over the years. I was gut punched and left breathless with this book and I have told every person who reads about it in hopes that others can get the same breathless feeling

Have you read this one? What parts punched you in the gut?