“What we're dealing with is institutional, and unless systems are put into place that will ensure accountability, we can expect racially biased police practices to continue.”
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Author detail
Michelle Alexander was born in Illinois. She graduated from Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She joined the firm of Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, where she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination. She was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic. In 2005, she was a Soros Justice Fellow. She currently holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus, Ohio. Her first book, The New Jim Crow was published in 2010.
Quotes
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“What we're dealing with is institutional, and unless systems are put into place that will ensure accountability, we can expect racially biased police practices to continue.”
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“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 are activists and to envision thems...”
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“When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our 'colorblind' society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure - the structure...”
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“The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African...”
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“The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.”
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“Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.”
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“The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America...”
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“When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can...”
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“If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste...”
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“The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, 'get tough' mantras, and a seemin...”
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“Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial p...”
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“Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.”
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“Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely min...”
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“Thousands of people go to jail, go to prison, every year without even meeting with an attorney.”
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“Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people to plea bargain and essen...”
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“People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from...”
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“I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic...”
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“In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington but what he said and did after the march. In the years following the march, he...”
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“I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly...”
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“I am a criminal. Coming to terms with this aspect of my identity has helped me to see more clearly - with blinders off - the ways in which I have been encouraged not to feel any connection t...”
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