Tink Boyd

The New Jim Crow

In the early 1830s, the white actor Thomas

Dartmouth Daddy Rice was launched into stardom
for performing as the fictional Jim Crow, a character
of a clumsy, and dumb black slave. Rice claimed to
have first created the character after witnessing an
elderly black man singing a tune called Jump Jim
Crow in Louisville, Kentucky. He later associated the
Jim Crow persona into an act of a play, where he put
on blackface paint, and performed jokes and songs in
a stereotypical slave dialect. This lead to using the
phrase Jim Crow when naming the practice of segregating white and black people in the US.

For some background, Jim Crow laws were rules and guidelines created by southern
white men to keep whites and blacks segregated. These were also referred to as separate but
equal laws, where the blacks
buildings or utilities were always
worse, if they even existed. Even
though, Jim Crow laws were finally
abolished on 2 July 1964 when
President Lyndon Johnson signed
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The
world still faces these similar
problems today; through unfair police
brutality, unjust treatment in the
court systems, and mass
incarceration of black people. This is
the New Jim Crow. In the constitution it is stated that, Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, and
they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. If African Americans and Hispanics were
incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost
40%. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites, and the
imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. Nationwide,
African American children represent 32% of children who are arrested, 42% of children who are
detained, and 52% of children whose cases are judicially waived to criminal court. These
statistics support my belief that this IS the new Jim Crow and is a system to keep black people
enslaved.

What Jim Crow is to me is the standard that was set by

Caucasian Americans that told us, the African American race
and people of color, that we will never be equal as whites. The
whites claiming that the country is theirs, and that they are the
superior race. Throughout my life I have been faced with these
similar situations that makes me feel so strongly about this.
Growing up, I never thought my skin color would matter,
nevertheless be a problem. But recently since I have matured
into a young black man, my skin color seems to become more and more of an obstacle, and it
becomes more apparent the older I get.

A week ago, I pulled into a gas station simply to put gas into my car. Upon my arrival
there I received an aggressive, hateful but somewhat scared stare from an older white man. I
was utterly confused because I have neither seen or met this man in my life. After I got out of
my car, he still gave me this look, but when I stared back he shot his head down to the gas
pump. This repeated until he finished pumping gas into his car until he eventually got in the car
and pulled off. There was two other black men on the opposite side of the pump from me, who
were talking about the same man that was staring at me. I heard him say Bruh not every black
person want to rob or hurt you And thats when I chimed in and said, Yall have to be talking
about the white man that just left, Hell yea man, I dont get why they have to look at us that
way, but sadly thats the world we live in, they responded. It didnt hit me until after I got home
how big of a deal this is that this is how we are looked at on a daily basis, and that feeling that I
felt and the action of that white man is what relates todays world into the same mindset of Jim
Crow Laws.

Works Cited:
- Statistics: Criminal Justice Fact Sheet. NAACP,www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.
 - Jim Crow Laws. PBS, Public Broadcasting
Service,www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedom-riders-jim-crow-laws/?
scrlybrkr=62110888.
- Andrews, Evan. Was Jim Crow a Real Person? History.com, A&E Television Networks, 29
Jan. 2014, www.history.com/news/ask-history/was-jim-crow-a-real-person?
scrlybrkr=866ed328#.
- Waggoner, Jess. My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience: Afro-Modernist Critiques of
Eugenics and Medical Segregation. Modernism/Modernity, The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1 Sept. 2017, muse.jhu.edu/article/668648/summary.