Michelle Alexander Quotes
40 quotes
in 832 categories
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More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of…
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The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison…
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Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in…
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Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the…
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The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.
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The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s…
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Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city…
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If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass…
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A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast…
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Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade…
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No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black…
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it
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Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
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The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice…
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Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are…
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My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did…
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Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity,…
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We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view,…
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Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.
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