Michelle Alexander Quotes

40 quotes in 832 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade…
• 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…
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it
• Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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,…
• Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

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