"Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration……" — Michelle Alexander
"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 America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black."
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Michelle Alexander
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39 Quotes by Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander has 39 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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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…
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The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent…
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Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that…
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The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and…
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The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.…
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Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from…
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If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves…
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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…
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Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were…
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No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a…
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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
See all 39 quotes by Michelle Alexander »
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