Public Transportation

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater
New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017
305 p. ; 22 cm.

A friend read this book and told me I should read it.  I'm glad she did.  It's a timely and interesting non-fiction YA book.

The basic "story" of the book involves two teens from different worlds in Oakland, California whose lives intersect on a city bus when one - a genderqueer student who looks like a boy but wears skirts - is set on fire by another student - a lively, friendly African American young man from another school.  The act was a rash "prank" intended more to harass and perhaps humiliate the targeted student, but it ended up seriously injuring the victim, and was treated as a felonious, adult hate crime.

The book delves into the different world of these two young people and manages to convey the terrible nature of the crime and its effects, while also richly fleshing out the perpetrator.

There is a lot to mull over in this book.  The roles that race, gender identity, family, poverty, policing and criminal justice play in our society.

I really like that the book jumps right in with the crime, and then proceeds to introduce us to the main protagonists in this drama.  It also helps us see the ways that criminal justice serves and does not serve both victims and perpetrators.

This would be a great book to use in a class room to open up discussions of racial justice, criminal justice, gender identity, privilege and income inequality.

In addition to being a relevant read, it's also compelling and well written. I would recommend it.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
New York : New Press, 2010.
xi, 290 p. ; 24 cm.

This is a book I've been wanting to read since it first came out in 2010.  It received a lot of praise, and time has proven that the praise was not misplaced.

In the last couple of years - especially following the killings of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown and the subsequent emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement - the national debate on the injustices of law enforcement and the criminal justice system toward black people in the US has taken on a vibrant and expansive life.  Reading The New Jim Crow during the summer of 2016, I couldn't help but wonder how amazed Michelle Alexander must feel about events that have occurred in the ten years since she published the book.

Her book is a thorough, well researched, and toughly argued case against the US criminal justice system - especially the mass incarceration of African Americans since the ramping up of the War on Drugs.

What makes her book especially powerful - in addition to its research data and passion for justice - is that it shows how the new mass incarceration of black people is simply a continuation of the historic pattern of racism in the US adapting to new social changes and traditions in order to reestablish the oppression of African Americans: first slavery, then after the Civil War and reconstruction comes Jim Crow, and after the Civil Rights movement and legal gains, comes the War on Drugs and the lopsided application of it against people of color.

It's a powerful book and still very timely.  I'd recommend it to any student wanting to research or understand mass incarceration and institutional race