In Lake Charles, Louisiana, the public defender office has…

If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that…

— Michelle Alexander

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as…

— Michelle Alexander

“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race…

— Michelle Alexander

Since the nations founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die but then…

— Michelle Alexander

“Felon disenfranchisement laws have been more effective in eliminating black voters in the age of mass incarceration than they were under Jim Crow…These figures…

— Michelle Alexander

“That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting…

— Michelle Alexander

Activists take the risks, while advocates are professional tinkerers with the system. What's necessary is for those who are advocates to support those who…

— Michelle Alexander

“Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive “lenience” toward lawlessness, thereby…

— Michelle Alexander

We cannot 'fix' the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society.

— Michelle Alexander

If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of…

— Michelle Alexander

The mass incarceration of poor people of color, particularly black men, has emerged as a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the…

— Michelle Alexander

“[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. —W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America…

— Michelle Alexander

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for…

— Michelle Alexander

“A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the…

— Michelle Alexander

The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are…

— Michelle Alexander