In Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she brings up prominent African Americans like President Obama for several reasons. In chapter 6, she has a subsection named, “Obama — the Promise and the Peril”. The subsection starts out with some prior information and the first paragraph ends with a rhetorical question (I believe is the correct word), one that the reader will be able to answer by the end of the section. The next paragraph goes on with an anecdote about President Obama in his early years, about how he used to inhale marijuana and how those bad decisions could have led him into a whole different part of life that is completely opposite of where he is now. That life would be of a “junkie” or a “pothead”. She uses the president as a prime example just to show possibly ethos because typically the president is a trusted figure, but she goes on to give points of why we should view him otherwise. These points being with his choice of Vice President, Joe Biden, and his choice of Rahm Emanuel who are both strident drug warriors, or in other words, against drug users. I suppose that she includes these facts because she wants to make it known that Obama went off his campaign trail to make it look like he isn’t “soft” on crime, so he could be better liked int he political world. She also then brings up towards the end of her subsection how many black people choose to ignore the racial issues during his presidency to ensure that he gets a smooth sailing and looks good as a presidential figure. All of these points that she makes that are prominent with President Obama help contribute to her argument by showing that some are negligent to the fact that some will just sit back and wait for changes to be made, rather than making it themselves and using other ways to get things to happen — whether it is through Vice Presidents, or sparking up old laws. She also shows that with the President’s anecdote that if he had still used drugs throughout the end of his teenage years he would be in a much different place than he is now, since the “Drug War” would have found him somewhere and somehow. So, in conclusion, Alexander brings up points in order to advance her point that there are still issues to mass incarceration and the Drug War that need to be fixed, but some just sit back while there is a colored man in office and ignore the racial issues in order to just let the President have a smooth sail through office.
Good analysis!
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