The Federal Bar Association Book Club is hosting a Building Relationships Between the Bench & Bar book discussion. To participate in the FBA Book Club, please register online at www.fbamich.org or contact Brian D. Figot, executive director, Chapter Office at (248) 594-5950 or fbamich@fbamich.org.
Book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.
For additional information on the book club, contact Andrew S. Doctoroff at (517) 335-0236 or
doctoroffa@michigan.org
, David Fink at (248) 971-2500 or
dfink@finkandassociateslaw.com
, or Erica L. Fitzgerald at (313) 596-9318 or
efitzgerald@bsdd.com
.
About the Club
The primary goal of the Federal Bar Association Book Club is to facilitate an informal but elevated dialogue between the bench and the bar. The book club is non-partisan.
“[An] instant classic . . . The New Jim Crow is a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable.”—Cornel West, philosopher and social activist.
“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 . . . [She] is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but The New Jim Crow is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing. Her tone is disarming throughout; she speaks as a concerned citizen, not as an expert, though she is one. She can make the abstract concrete, as J. Saunders Redding once said in praise of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history.”
No charge to FBA members; $5 per session to non-members. Lunch will be offered for $10 or bring your own. Theodore Levin United States Courthouse 231 W. Lafayette, Detroit, MI 48226-2788. Judges’ Conference Center, Room 72.