People are talking about “The New Jim Crow,” the term proposed by Michelle Alexander in her book with that title. According to a documentary about this, the “discrimination that was legal in the Jim Crow era is today illegal when applied to black people but perfectly legal when applied to ‘criminals.’ Since the rise of the drug war and the explosion of the prison population, and because discretion within the sys­tem allows for arrest and prosecution of people of color at alarmingly higher rates than whites, pris­ons and criminal penal­ties have become a new ver­sion of Jim Crow.”

In a column in today’s Times of Trenton, meet Barbara Flythe, who is on the New Jim Crow task force. She leads the discussion at Witherspoon Presbyterian Church on first Sundays, i.e. Sunday, February 4, 11:45 a.m.   

On Wednesday, February 6, at 7 p.m., at the Princeton Public Library, see the documentary mentioned above, Matthew Pillischer’s “Broken on All Sides.” Pillischer will be there for the discussion. 

POSTPONED due to storm On Friday, February 8, at 6:45 p.m., at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah, 406 Nassau Street, Mark Taylor, a professor at the seminary, will lecture on “I Was in Prison: Remembering Jesus in the U.S. Lockdown. Taylor, the author of “The Executed God,” has been active on issues involving incarceration for many years and is a compelling speaker. 

February is of course a time when many organizations try to focus on issues experienced by people of color. This year, the criminal justice system is the focus for many of these events. Here is a partial calendar from the Not in Our Town Princeton website.

Not in Our Town  invites anyone/everyone to Continuing Conversations on Race on first Mondays at 7:30 p.m. at the Princeton Public Library.