Challenging the notion that the election of Barack Obama signaled a new era of colorblindness in the United States, lawyer Michelle Alexander reveals how racial discrimination was not ended but merely redesigned. Millions of African Americans have been imprisoned and then relegated to a permanent second-class status, denied the rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, Alexander argues here, the American criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control.