Summary Of Masked Racism By Angela Davis

In Angela Davis' "Masked Racism: Reflections of the Prison Industrial Complex", she focuses on the aspect of imprisonment in our society and how racism is involved in this light. "These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category 'crime' and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color" (Davis). She also explains how prison labor is profitable for certain private companies. Davis continues how the government earns from prisons and how many more women are punished in prisons all our country. Davis shares the statistic,
"More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners are black women and
that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita" (Davis).
To solidify her argument, Davis categorizes her last proof calling it "hidden agenda" in which she discusses how mass incarceration does not solve unemployment and the existing social problems in the nation. The author claims that "[r]acism has undermined our ability to create a popular critical discourse to contest the ideological trickery that posits imprisonment as key to public safety" (Davis). Furthermore, she explains how minorities are viewed to be as the criminals and violators of the law.