The election of Barack Obama in November 2008 marked a historic turning point in the USA: the first black president seemed to represent a post-racial society and the triumph of the civil rights movement. However, the reality in the USA is different. Although racial segregation, enshrined in the so-called Jim Crow laws, was abolished during the civil rights movement, an astonishingly high percentage of the black population is now imprisoned or permanently labeled as criminals. This status makes people second-class citizens by stripping them of their most fundamental rights—similar to the explicitly racist discriminations of the Jim Crow era. In her book, which has sparked a wide debate in America, Michelle Alexander argues that the USA has not shed its racist system after the civil rights movement.