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The Death of Slavery
Alexander's main point is stated that "racial segregation would soon evolve into a new caste system" which in return verifies her claim that the backlash of slavery survived into a more "civilized" way of treating African Americans. Michelle Alexander goes in depth on her view of how Slavery was ended after the Civil War. Although this is true, Slavery has left a remarkable impact into American society. It had given the idea that the White male was supreme over all others. Slavery flourished for more than four centuries, and that in turn gave birth to race supremacy. Slavery in it's actions ended, but it's ideas and overall impressions on other races lived on throughout the centuries. Michelle Alexander the author of the New Jim Crow, states that most white people believed that African Americans were lacking in their actions. They did not have the motivation to work, giving the Southern legislatures a reason to create black codes. This is was the foreshadowing of the New Jim Crow laws. Many whites were afraid of an uprising by the blacks, and many saw them as aggressive and were afraid to see them rise up and attack. According to Michelle Alexander, "some of these codes were intended to establish systems of peonage resembling slavery" meaning that they were still holding blacks on a certain level of freedom. She also states "prisoners became younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared." This was the first example of mass incarceration in the past, and still exists today. Slavery was not completely wiped out from society and instead transformed into the new caste system. The new racial caste system has taken a hold of what African Americans are viewed by the media today. The media is a big part of society today, and is playing a big role on current civil rights movements.

Race
Race and its ideology about human differences arose out of the context of African slavery. But many peoples throughout history have been enslaved without the imposition of racial ideology. When we look at 17th century colonial America before the enactment of laws legitimizing slavery only for Africans and their descendants several facts become clear. The first people that the English tried to enslave and place on plantations were the Irish with whom they had had hostile relations since the 13th century. Some Englishmen had proposed laws enslaving the poor in England and in the colonies to force them to work indefinitely. Most of the slaves on English plantations in Barbados and Jamaica were Irish and Indians. Many historians point out that African servants and bonded indentured white servants were treated much the same way.

Until the 18th century the image of Africans was generally positive. They were farmers and cattle-breeders; they had industries, arts and crafts, governments and commerce. In addition, Africans had immunities to Old World diseases. They were better laborers and they had nowhere to escape to once transplanted to the New World. It was an era when the ideals of equality, justice, democracy, and human rights were becoming dominant features of Western political philosophy. Those involved in the trade rationalized their actions by arguing that the Africans were heathens after all. By the early part of the 18th century, the institution was fully established for Africans and their descendants. Large numbers of slaves flooded the southern colonies and even some northern ones. Sometimes they outnumbered whites, and the laws governing slavery became increasingly harsher.

Thus was created the only slave system in the world that became exclusively "racial." By limiting perpetual servitude to Africans and their descendants, colonists were proclaiming that blacks would forever be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. By keeping blacks, Indians and whites socially and spatially separated and enforcing mating, they were making sure that visible physical differences would be preserved as the premier insignia of unequal social statuses. From its inception separateness and inequality was what "race" was all about. The attributes of inferior race status came to be applied to free blacks as well as slaves. In this way, "race" was configured as an autonomous new mechanism of social differentiation that transcended the slave condition and persisted as a form of social identity long after slavery ended. *